


Perfect Little Freaks: Act 4

by AOrange



Series: Perfect Little Freaks [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Comedy, F/F, F/M, Family Drama, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Pesterlog, Relationship(s), Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-16
Updated: 2015-04-28
Packaged: 2018-01-25 00:22:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 45,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1622282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AOrange/pseuds/AOrange
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave knows he's a Strider, Rose is off in college, Dirk's moved clear across the country, and Roxy is struggling to cope with all the changes. </p><p>It's business as usual, then.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. [A4A1]: california here we come

**Author's Note:**

> Picks up a week after the end of Act 3.

**November, 2013**

Airplanes had always been a big part of Dave's life. For as long as he could remember both Roxy and Dirk had been flying in and out of the state for work. His mom had probably looped the Earth six times over because of her business trips and had enough frequent flyer miles to send all of New York state on yearly overseas vacations for the next decade. Her travel had always been consistent. She would fly out, be gone a week, then come home with stories, photos, and gifts. Dirk's travel had been more erratic. Sometimes he was home for months on end when nothing was happening. Then, suddenly, he would be gone for weeks or months to record or tour and he was never sure how long it would be until he made it back to New York.

Dave had flown all of once in his life before the morning of his seventeenth birthday.

He hadn't remembered that planes had a certain smell about them until he'd boarded the small  
Embraer jet in Watertown. The recirculated air was too dry in his nose and he'd spent the hour long flight trying not to look as irritated by the cramped surroundings as he felt. He'd changed planes at O'Hare and called Roxy during his walk from Terminal 3 across to Terminal 1 to let her know he'd landed with plenty of time to make his connection. She'd drawn him a map the night before even though he already had one up on his laptop screen; she insisted hers was more accurate and he'd just laughed at her, even though he knew it probably was. 

Besides, she'd drawn in the location of every Starbucks kiosk he was going to pass.

Two hours into the flight from Chicago to San Diego, he'd realised that the instructions he'd left for Paul's feeding schedule probably weren't clear enough. The directions were stuck on the fridge with additional copies taped to his bedroom door, the side of her tank, and a soft copy sent to his mom's email, but something told him that still wouldn't be enough. He'd sent Roxy a series of iMessages detailing the exact times that Paul needed to be fed and for five minutes all she'd replied with was a winky emoticon over and over, until finally a Snapchat came through of her taking a selfie with the instructions on his terrarium. 

Dave wouldn't admit it to anyone, but as hard as things had been at home lately, he was going to miss his mom. 

He replied with a selfie of his own and captioned it with something about the smell of stale puke. 

He waited a little longer before collecting his laptop from the overhead compartment. With another two hours of flight-time to kill, he'd started editing some photos he'd taken during a snowstorm the previous week. They weren't his best, he knew that, but it had been an interesting enough challenge in the low light and he'd taken a nice one of Roxy standing in the open doorway before she'd realised what he was doing. He was still deciding if some editing would make it nice enough to frame for her for Christmas. 

The one of Paul in her Princess Peach dress was, naturally, awesome enough to simultaneously post on three of his blogs and completely worth the fifteen bucks it cost for in-flight Wi-Fi access.

He took another few selfies and posted them under the caption of _im on a ~~boat~~ plane_ just before his second hour of Wi-Fi ran out. Somewhere between losing progress when Photoshop crashed and having to get out of his seat so the elderly woman next to him could use the bathroom for a third time, a muffled announcement from the captain alerted him to the fact that they were fifteen minutes away from landing. He tucked his phone back into his pocket, slipped his backpack out of the compartment to put his laptop away, and then stowed the bag under the seat in front of him so he didn't have to get up again. 

A flight attendant had to point out that under his feet wasn't the safest place to stow his skateboard. 

He hated landings. He'd experienced five of them and all five had been shitty experiences that he didn't want to repeat. He knew that there was no way the sixth was going to be any better and the ones on his return trip were probably going to be worse again. It was smooth enough in the end, even though the woman beside him had patted his elbow reassuringly when he started muttering about _Seconds From Disaster_ under his breath as they approached the tarmac. 

The worst part was waiting for the rows ahead to clear out before he could leave. He needed to go for a piss, find Dirk, and grab a frappuccino as soon as he found a Starbucks. He was willing to bet it wouldn't take long to track one down, not after Roxy had mapped out their locations for him. He darted through the crowd across to the bathroom before too many other people could make it in there, then followed the signs leading to the exit. 

He was standing in line at the first Starbucks he passed when he felt a hand clap him gently on the shoulder. 

"I don't think you'll need that jumper on much longer, mate."

"Shit," Dave swore, dragging his headphones down from over his ears. He thought he'd done a good job of managing not to jump at the touch, but Jake's welcoming laugh told him he hadn't pulled it off as well as he thought. "Why not?"

"It's over sixty degrees outside."

"Seriously?"

"I thought that's why you were queueing for one of those frozen icy drinks for hip wankers."

"Nah, I'm just getting one because I'm a filthy sell out so half a point or whatever. Where's Bro?"

"He got in a bit of an argument with his computer and got stuck on hold with the manufacturer," Jake explained with a brief eye-roll. "Something about one bit not connecting to another part, I don't know. I was only half listening at the time."

"Huh," Dave mused. "You want anything?"

"Oh, no thanks. You just get your blended coffee whatsit and we'll head off."

+++

When Jake stopped beside a silver Prius in the parking lot, Dave gave an involuntary snort of laughter. His efforts were rewarded with a comment telling him laugh it up all he wanted, because it was reliable and better for the environment than anything Dirk had ever driven. Dave just shrugged in response and threw his backpack and skateboard into the trunk then slipped into the passengers seat.

He pushed up the sleeves of his hoodie and switched on the air conditioning while Jake was preoccupied with backing out of the car space. 

"Oi, turn that off. It's not even hot out."

"It's like twenty degrees hotter than it was when I left home."

"So take your jumper off."

"You're telling me you were serious about that? It's fucking November."

"Yes, but you're less than thirty miles from Mexico right now. So, wiseguy, did you pack anything that's not a pair of jeans or an assortment of hoodies?" 

"I think I packed my toothbrush," Dave said. He switched the air con off again and compromised, unzipping his hoodie all the way but refusing to take it off entirely. 

"That's not quite what I meant, mate," Jake said, taking his eyes off the road long enough to glance over at Dave. 

"I don't know, I packed everything at like seven this morning. I could've picked up some shorts or something. It's not like we're in the middle of nowhere or anything, I'm pretty sure you've got a mall somewhere around here. Is that one?"

"Well, yes, actually. Oh, how was the flight, anyway? I don't think I asked."

Jake talked a lot, Dave quickly realised. He talked excitedly, waving his hands around for emphasis even when they probably should have been on the steering wheel. The only real time they'd spent alone together had been earlier in the year when he and Dirk had flown back to New York, and they'd spent most of that time talking about Paul and the rest of Dave's preserved specimens. But now, he was talking about so many things at once that it was hard to keep track of it all. He'd been discussing everything that they passed during the trip until Dave had to point out that yeah, he lived in the woods but he knew what a Seven Eleven looked like. Jake had countered with the argument that perhaps they looked different in California, which Dave had accepted as valid. 

"Here we are," Jake said, pulling the car up alongside the curb. Dave didn't even hear it switch off.

"Seriously?"

"No, I thought I might just stop in at someone else's house on the way. Of course I'm bloody serious."

"That was like a twenty minute trip. In traffic. We just drove for twenty minutes in traffic and we're at your fucking house already? That's mindblowing, dude. Completely fucking mindblowing. Airports aren't supposed to be that close to the 'burbs. Holy fucking shit," Dave said, cutting himself off mid-sentence as he climbed out of the passengers' seat. "You live in the 'burbs."

"Well it's convenient for work, you know? It's just round the corner. You've got everything then?"

"Yeah," Dave nodded, slamming the door shut behind him. He went around to the trunk to collect his backpack and skateboard. "Oh my fucking God, you got Bro to move to the goddamn suburbs. That's fucking hilarious. You seriously live in this house?"

"You're deliberately being facetious now, aren't you?" Jake asked. He stopped on the pavement beside Dave, who was staring at the house with a confused expression. "You're not."

"I'm really fucking not. This is like some shit off TV."

"You grew up in what could easily be called a mansion in the middle of the woods and you find the existence of a standard suburban dwelling difficult to comprehend?"

"Is that an American flag?"

"Perhaps."

"Has the Queen charged you with high treason for that?"

"I'm fairly certain that I've been a citizen of this country for as long as you've been alive."

"Bro laughed at you for it though, didn't he?"

"For a full week," Jake admitted with a sigh. "That was donkey's years ago now though. I think it's grown on him since then." 

"He loves it," Dave said. It was a statement though, not a question.

"A little too much. Anyway, shall we?" Jake agreed, gesturing towards the front path. "Are you hungry? I doubt they fed you much of anything on that flight and I haven't seen you eat anything other than your iced coffee doodad."

"I picked up a donut in Chicago. I'll be okay until later," Dave said, hitching up his backpack on one shoulder before following Jake towards the house. "What's up with all the palm trees?"

"Welcome to California," Jake grinned, holding the front door open for Dave to walk through into the house. "Living room is just on the right, skip the next door because that's just the nice dining room, but the next one is the kitchen," he explained. 

Dave poked his head around into the living room and peered over the top of his glasses to get a good look. It was old, he noticed. The whole house was old and it looked it, right down to the detailed moulding on the ceiling and the ornate fireplace on the opposite wall. He dumped his bag just inside the doorway and pushed his shades back up onto his face before following Jake down the hall.

"Bedroom, cinema, bathroom, nothing exciting," he explained off-handedly. "It's not much. The door in the kitchen goes out to the yard which is essentially more of nothing except for some more grass and a washing line."

"You've got a cinema?"

"And yet again you're surprised by something so quaint when you live on the set of a horror film."

"So where's Bro?"

"The puppet room."

"The fucking what now?"

"Don't look at me like that, you heard exactly what I said."

"You gave him a room for all his puppets?"

"Well, no, he had to have it done up first. It's up in the attic," Jake explained, pointing up at the hatch on the hallway ceiling. "It was always there, it just needed some new plaster and a bit of work. There was no way he was storing them all in the cinema so it was a bit of a necessary conversion. We spent months tripping over the blasted things because he left them in piles all over the place. Go on up and I'll put the kettle on. Just sort of pull the hatch down, you'll figure it out."

"Yeah, thanks," Dave said. He waited until Jake had disappeared into the kitchen to reach for the cord. He stood off to the side to work it out from there, since he didn't really have any plans to take a ladder to the face. Jake was right. It sort of just pulled down and took care of itself. He climbed, then stepped out into the attic space. 

"Sup?" 

It would have been a pretty dramatic entrance if Dirk hadn't been sitting at a desk, facing the wall with headphones on.

Dave rolled his eyes. 

It was the heavy, obvious footsteps that got Dirk's attention. He spun around in the desk chair and waited for Dave to say the inevitable.

"You didn't pick me up, asshole."

"Sorry, man, I was out getting you something," he said with a shrug.

"Seriously? I take back the asshole thing if there's a free pile of gifts involved. Like I know I just managed to get a plane by myself but fucking gifts? Shit, dude, totally makes up for the like eight hours I managed not to fall out of the sky in a physics-defying tube of steel."

"I got you those curtains," Dirk said, gesturing to the window.

"Oh, thanks," Dave said, in what he hoped was a tone of general enthusiasm. "They're nice. Great. I fucking love curtains."

"There's a set of blackout blinds behind them. You're sleeping up here this week so I thought you might like those."

"You want me to sleep in what even Jake calls _The Puppet Room_?"

"They're from Ikea."

" _Dude_."

"Happy Birthday, Dave."

"He said you were stuck on a warranty call or some shit," Dave said, looking around. He didn't acknowledge what Dirk had said but the hint of a grin was enough to indicate he'd heard the comment.

It was easy to see why the room had earned its title. Dirk's desk was in the far corner beside the window so he could look out onto the street while he worked. At the opposite end, behind the access hatch, was a row of storage cupboards that ran the full width of the room and gradually grew smaller towards the sides where the roof started to taper down. The walls were lined with shelves that overflowed with Dirk's puppet collection. On a few smaller shelves above the desk were the characters he'd used in his albums over the years, creating something like a wall of fame. Dave made a note to take a photo of that later, so he could send it to Karkat just to see how big of an hilarious, shit-flipping fanboy reaction he'd get. 

There was no sign of Cal though.

"Nah, I was calling Ikea to see if they had the blackouts. I didn't want to drive the whole ten minutes over there if they didn't."

"What, you just had the window with nothing in front of it?" The concept of a bare window was entirely foreign to Dave, who hadn't opened his bedroom curtains in almost ten years. 

"I don't sleep up here," Dirk shrugged. "The couch folds out though."

"How'd you even get this up here?" Dave asked, collapsing down onto the couch. "Holy shit, I'm not even unfolding this thing. Have you ever sat on this thing? This is softer than the softest soft grunge in the soft grunge tag."

"Why would I have a couch up here if I didn't sit on it?"

"No, seriously, how did you even get this up here?"

"Shenanigans, mostly. Better get back down though, Jake's probably doing the whole tea and biscuits routine."

+++

Thankfully, 'tea and biscuits' translated to a pot of coffee with a side of imported cookies. Jake insisted on taking everything through to the living room, despite Dirk claiming that Dave hardly even counted as company, let alone the kind that needed everything to be done properly. As if to illustrate his point, he gestured to Dave, who was busy shoving a handful of cookies into his hoodie pocket so he could carry his coffee and text at the same time.

Jake relented, but still brought the rest of the cookies with him. 

"Cal says hi," Dirk said, dropping the puppet down beside Dave on the floor. He jumped enough that if his coffee had been any closer on the table, he would have knocked it over. Dirk gave a snort of laughter and picked Cal back up when Dave made a move to shove him aside, and returned him to his place in the miniature armchair beside the fireplace. 

"Tell him to fuck off," Dave added for good measure. He was sitting with his legs crossed under the edge of the coffee table, steadily working his way through the stack of cookies he'd removed from his pocket. 

"Be nice."

"When have I ever been nice to him?"

"Now's a good time to start since you're sleeping in his territory," Dirk shrugged. He sat down on the end of the couch nearest to Dave, finally setting his own coffee down. "You know what he's like."

Dave had two options: engage him in a whirlwind bullshit dispute that no one would win, or change the subject so dramatically that Cal was momentarily forgotten.

He'd never gone with Plan A in his life and seventeen didn't seem like the age to start.

"So what's with the skulls?"

"I happen to quite like their charming aesthetic is what's with them," Jake answered, sitting down on the far end of the couch. "Either that or I enjoy the visual reminder that these great apes are dead as all buggery."

"You're a conservationist."

"Well I didn't personally kill them."

"Oh my fucking God."

"What? For all I know, there's an alternate universe where I'm a scheming old bastard who puts apes to work in diamond mines."

"I'd buy that," Dirk pitched in. 

Now he had two adults to sidetrack. 

"What are they, chimps?"

Dave knew it wasn't the best subject change, but he gave himself a gold star for trying in the face of a double ambush by two lunatics. He added a second gold star because he knew neither Dirk nor Jake were even trying yet.

"Well the two closest to the TV end of the mantel are, as well as the fourth one along. There's a few orang utans, three gorillas, and the one closest to us here is my great grandfather," Jake explained, indicating each skull as he did.

Then he looked puzzledly back at the other two, who were both silent for possibly the first time in their lives.

"Jake."

"Dirk."

"Say that again, would you?"

"That one on the end is my great grandfather. Well, I suppose it _was_ him. It's still his skull, you see, but he's been dead quite a while now so I don't know what the proper way to refer to it is, really," Jake explained, still getting no real response. "Oh! He was a Jake, too. Well, a _Jacob_ , actually, but it's near enough that my father named me after him."

"Jake," Dirk said again, more curtly this time.

"What?"

"How long has that been there?"

"Oh, uh, a few years now. When was the last time I went home for Christmas?"

"Three years ago. You're telling me you've had your dead grandpa here for three years?"

" _Great_ grandfather, actually."

"How the fuck do you even get a human skull past the TSA?"

"Well I've got full clearance to carry bone specimens so I just put him in with those and no one was any the wiser," Jake said, if a little sheepishly. "It's certainly not illegal to own the things, if that's what you're getting at."

"It wasn't, but that's a pretty impressive story in its own right," Dirk scoffed. 

"Thanks," Jake said brightly.

"This is hella cool," Dave said, finally speaking up. Neither Dirk nor Jake had seen him get up and walk over to the fireplace, but he was leaning forward to examine the skull more closely. 

"You can pick it up but just try to be careful, would you? He's rather irreplaceable."

"I can't believe you never thought to bring up the fact that your dead great grandfathers' skull was in here," Dirk said, slightly put off by Dave's overt fascination with the bone. 

"You've never asked though, have you?"

"And what would I have had to say to get a straight answer?"

"Well, I suppose you would have had to specifically ask me to define each individual skull by species."

"Are you serious right now?"

"Are you? Your boy's collected dead things for years, I've always had skulls in the house, and aren't you getting a little worked up over one dead family member?" Jake asked. "You never even met the man. He was a bit of a bastard, really. Oh, actually, he spent a bit of time in the colonies so he very well could have had a gorilla-run diamond mine."

Dave had to agree with him, at least on the first point. He'd always had dead things in his bedroom. He kept them on shelves that Dirk had been the one to build. There was no way he wouldn't have known Jake had skulls in the house before he moved in, since he'd been visiting whenever he could for the better part of a decade. 

"I'm not worked up, fuck. I just never exactly thought I'd find out I've been watching trashy reality TV with your dead grandpa. I wonder what he thinks of the Kardashians," Dirk said, adding the last comment more as an afterthought than anything else. 

"He was born before radio even existed, I doubt he understands why there are people trapped in the magic box in the corner of the room. That said though, he's probably fond enough of them."

"You're insane."

"And how's Cal's flu coming along today?" Jake asked, with a raised eyebrow and a hint of a grin.

"Great, I think he's over the worst," Dirk shot back quickly. 

"Oh good, I was a tad worried for a while there that we were going to lose him to that dastardly influenza."

" _Bullshit_ you were worried."

"I adore every one of your children equally, you know that."

"Hey!" Dave interrupted. 

"I'm sorry, mate, but I just can't take sides. It's not fair," Jake said. He gave a shrug and threw Dave an apologetic look. 

"We're not being serious," Dirk pointed out, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees as he picked up his coffee from the table. He thought that was obvious but Dave's protest had seemed genuine enough that he wasn't sure if it was an objection to him being grouped together with Cal, or to the idea that he might not have actually been favoured over the puppet. 

"It's just a bit of a cold, not the proper flu," Jake added. "And you can sleep soundly because I do probably like you a little more than I like Cal. Your eyes might be a tad more damaged but they're less terrifying. Only slightly though, mind you."

"Holy shit, dude, I'm right here. You can't say that to my fucking face," Dave said, returning to his place on the floor looking more disgruntled than he had been earlier. "Would you say to some guy without a leg 'hey, I bet I can run faster than you, Limpy McNo Foot'? How about some dude who shoved a lego in his ear as a kid and can't hear shit? 'Wow man, rude, try listening once in a while'. Would you punch a blind bitch who couldn't see it coming? Actually, scratch that last one because I totally would because I know one and she fucking deserves it."

"That was quite a rant, old chap."

"I'm not even close to done. I'm totally fucking entitled to punch the blind bitch because she's an asshole but I wouldn't say 'hey Terezi, I bet you didn't see that one coming.' No, shit, she'd think that was hilarious. Fuck, I had a fucking point."

"Did you?" Dirk asked curiously.

"Yeah, the point is that was totally a low blow because you can't say that shit to my face," Dave finished, scowling across at the adults from his place on the floor. He wasn't sure if he'd actually made his point but the gist of it was out there and that was better than nothing.

"I'll allow it," Dirk said after a moment of contemplation.

"You're supposed to be on my side!"

"Why?"

"We're family!"

"So what, now you're saying Jake's not family? Real nice, Dave."

"I thought he liked me," Jake said, turning his head sharply to face Dirk. "You told me that he was alright with all of this and that everything would be just dandy if we brought him out here to visit for a few days."

"I thought he was," Dirk said incredulously. "I mean, shit, I don't know what's up with him lately. You get a kid all the way to his senior year of high school and he turns into an asshole."

"I don't want him here if he's just going to be like this all week."

Dave just boredly slumped forward onto the table, resting his chin on his folded arms. 

"So which one of you two idiots wrote this script? Like, I want to say Bro because it's got his fingerprints all over it, but whoever it was should know that it's the shittiest screenplay I've ever been exposed to and I've seen _The Last Airbender_ twice."

"Totally unscripted, mate," Jake said, flashing Dave a grin as he turned back around to pick up his mug again. "I've told him he watches too much of that daytime telly rubbish though."

"I do not."

"What happened yesterday on _General Hospital_?"

"Silas was -"

"Oh my fucking God, just tell me who or what to apologise to right now so it stops," Dave groaned, letting his head drop down onto the coffee table. 

"Cal, mostly."

"No way."

"Fine, Jake then."

"Did you not hear his dig at my defective irises? That was way harsher than anything I said about Cal."

"Why, because it's true?" Dirk said. "You stopped being pissed off about that years ago. It is literally a thing that you've accepted is never going get any better. Remember when they said the chances of you ever going blind because of it were only like one percent? That was awesome news, you were totally happy with that. I thought that was pretty sweet news, anyway."

"Not even on the same continent as the point, dude."

"So what _is_ the point?"

"The point is fuck you, where's my cake?"

Dirk knew it was all over the top. It was probably so far over the top that they'd skipped irony by miles and gone straight to idiocy, but the hell if that hadn't been worth it all. He was glad Jake had picked up on what he was doing. He probably would have even without the nudge to his foot, but with Dave exactly the right kind of pissed off to fuck around with, he wasn't going to let the opportunity go to waste, not when the chances to do that in person were increasingly rare. 

He put the dregs of his coffee down again and sat back on the couch, putting on the best impression of someone deep in thought that he could manage. 

"In the fridge," he admitted, giving up on the act entirely. "We'll get some pizza later."

+++

The next morning, Dave woke up with a crick in his neck from sleeping on the unfolded couch and a post-it note stuck to his forehead. He swiped the paper aside and replaced it with his glasses, turning over to lie on his back with his eyes closed for a few minutes before he chanced opening them in unfamiliar territory.

The blinds seemed to be working; he could hardly make out the shape of the windows between all the covers over them. 

It was another few minutes before he could focus on his phone screen long enough to work out what any of the notifications meant.

He quickly replied to the long-abandoned Pesterlogs from Karkat, John, and Rose in what he guessed was most to least likely to be interesting. Karkat wanted to know if he'd been shot by Mexican gangs yet and in response he asked if the other had been kidnapped by the mafia recently. John was just checking in like he usually did on weekdays, except with Dave's temporary shift in timezones he'd only missed their usual message exchange by half an hour. He messaged him back anyway even though John wouldn't check his phone during class. He made a comment to that effect in the log, even adding in a 'nerd' for good measure. Rose's message was just a reply to the three screens worth of text he'd left for her the night before so he ignored that in favour of actually getting up.

He had no idea what to do in someone else's house. 

The post-it note was enough to tell him that Dirk was awake. That was a good start. He didn't think that a teenager falling from a hole in the hallway ceiling was destined to be a good wake-up call for anyone. All the note said was that people were awake and not to hide out in the attic until lunch. Dave checked the time on his phone - it was just after eleven. Not exactly lunch, but it was closer to that than breakfast. 

Figuring that it was just basic fucking manners not to turn up in someone else's kitchen in your underwear, he scrounged up a pair of gym shorts from his backpack and picked up yesterday's t-shirt from the floor before going to unfold the ladder.

Dirk called a three minute warning that they were leaving the house before he even made it downstairs. 

He went back up to the attic, changed into his jeans and a clean shirt, grabbed his iPod and tried again. 

True to Dirk's word, they were all sitting in Jake's car less than five minutes after Dave had opened the attic hatch for the morning. When Dave asked where they were going and what the rush was all about, Jake just laughed and pointed out that it was a Wednesday and he had places to be. 

"Tell me again why we're even here?"

"Because I get a kick out of ruining your life," Dirk replied.

Dave rolled his eyes without looking up. They'd only been out for a little over an hour and that much was self-evident. That much had been self-evident for years.

"Tell me something I don't know."

"I got my Leo tattoo when I was seventeen."

It was that statement that finally diverted Dave's attention away from his iPhone. 

"Holy shit, were the Ninja Turtles even a thing then? Like yeah, sure, they were a thing, but they weren't even pop -" 

"Why're you looking at me like that?" Dirk asked suspiciously, raising an eyebrow in response to Dave suddenly stopping himself mid-sentence.

"You fucking hipster!"

"Hey, watch it with the insults."

"You're on my ass all the time about the filthy hipster shit and now you're telling me you got your shitty tattoo before those assholes were even cool? If that's not beautiful fucking irony, I don't even know what that word means anymore," Dave snorted.

"Not true. The first series came out more than a year before I got that thing done. I was probably closer to eighteen, I don't remember. It was a long time ago but I know I was more than just one day into being seventeen."

"Whatever."

"You still think it's awesome," Dirk scoffed, nudging Dave roughly with his elbow. 

"I don't know what you're talking about but it's clearly so awe-inspiring that you've commandeered my attention," Jake said, turning around to face the others for the first time in a few rounds. 

He usually took Tuesdays and Wednesdays as his weekends when he was home in San Diego. He'd been working like that for years and it didn't bother him since he was usually travelling anyway and had a lot of downtime for flights. He got bored too easily if left to his own devices and the fact that he didn't even get weekends consistently was the least of his concerns.

During the previous six months, he'd understandably found himself asking for more home shifts. His boss had agreed and she'd asked him to start training up one of the young girls to take over for him on some of the more routine trips, which would give him more time for the shifts he wanted if he was only travelling for the important events.

His intermittent weekends had never exactly been quiet. He had a lot to cram into those days because he was lucky if he got one a month between interstate trips. Everything that needed doing around the house had to be done on those days and between taking care of the yard and sorting out the piles of laundry that had built up, he wasn't left with much time for anything else. On weekends when Dirk had been able to visit, all of that got put aside for another month until his weekend rolled around again. 

There was always time for a trip to the shooting range though.

"Dude!" Dave yelped. "What the fuck!"

"Shit, Jake, loaded gun!"

"Oh, calm down, my finger's nowhere near the vicinity of the trigger," Jake said, literally waving their concerns aside with the pistol still in hand. "You're both acting like I'm some raving lunatic who doesn't know the first thing about controlling these weapons."

"Just put it down, would you?" Dirk asked. He didn't even realise that he'd stretched one arm out in front of Dave's chest purely on reflex. 

"Oh, pshaw," Jake rolled his eyes. "I did say to calm down, he of little faith."

Then he reached out behind him and emptied the last few bullets into the center of the paper target without even turning around to face it. 

"Holy shit," Dave said, trying to force Dirk's arm away.

Jake just grinned at how impressed he was by such an easy shot. 

"How much time have we got left?"

"Another twenty," Dirk said, finally lowering his arm when Dave kicked him with the heel of his sneaker. 

"What were you talking about, anyway?" Jake asked as he turned back around to reload. 

"His dumb tattoo."

"Ah, _that_ old thing."

"Come on, it was cool once and it'll be cool again," Dirk said, leaning over to see what Dave was doing on his phone. "Yours is worse." The wall of purple text told him that he was talking to his sister, but he didn't bother reading anything specific. That much conversation out of Rose usually meant something serious and he wasn't about to get himself involved.

"So maybe I'll get a shitty tattoo before I hit eighteen, you know, repeat lame-ass history and all that shit," Dave said, locking down his screen. "I'll get Raph."

"Bullshit you will, you're not cool enough to be Raph. Get April, since you're always shoving cameras in people's faces," Dirk laughed. "I bet we could find you a yellow jumpsuit at the mall. It'll be a day late for this birthday but it's close enough to count."

"Oh come the fuck on, point taken."

"No way, man, you started it."

"Yeah, but I was being an asshole. It doesn't count."

"What, you're telling me you don't really want a Ninja Turtles tattoo?"

"Not a fucking chance," Dave grimaced. He checked his phone again but with no notifications for him to chase up, he slipped it back into his pocket and slouched down in his chair. "They're awesome, but not that awesome."

"You sure? I'll write you a note," Dirk offered.

"Cool, I bet that'd work. Hey, I know I'm only seventeen but my dad wrote me a note so start inking. P.S, he's totally famous and he'll talk shit about you on the internet if you don't," Dave mocked, folding his arms over his chest.

"That's exactly what you should say."

"Nice."

"Offer's there."

"No thanks."

"What about some face metal? All the kids are doing it."

"Dude, what's up with you?" Dave asked, cocking an eyebrow. Dirk had always let him get away with more than he should have, he'd been well aware of that fact since he was eight, but something wasn't right about him openly offering to support the things most parents tried talking their kids out of doing.

"Do you know what year it was when I was seventeen? Nineteen eighty-eight. That's how long ago I hit seventeen. It was still the fucking 80s."

"Don't start this shit, dude. You're not even that old for an old man."

"The 80s, Dave."

"Yeah, so?"

"We didn't even have the internet back then. Imagine living without the fucking internet in your pocket all day, every day," Dirk said. "Go on, imagine it."

"Bro, what the hell? You're getting weird, and not the kind of weird that's normal for you."

"You're a god damn senior, Dave," Dirk said after a beat. "That's some scary shit for a guy like me."

"I'm fine, dude. I'm sitting on a B-average, I've applied to colleges, I don't want any shitty tattoos or face metal with or without you saying I can have them, and I've got enough commissions lined up for Christmas that I'll probably have a steady cash flow until March or something."

Dave looked up but he couldn't tell how the comment had gone down. Dirk was smiling, but it wasn't his usual grin and it wasn't a smirk, either. It wasn't the kind of smile that he used very often and that was the most troubling thing of all.

"You wanna go get a coke or something?"

"Yeah, okay."

"Here," Dirk said, handing over some spare change from his pocket. "We'll go soon."

"Where next?"

"Target."

"I can't believe you flew me all the way out here so I could tag along on errand runs for a week."

"Just go get your coke, Dave."

+++

"Why're you still awake?"

"A combination of staying up far too late last night, sleeping too late for two consecutive days, but mostly you and Dave having the blooming telly so loud that his lizard could hear it from New York," Jake said, lowering his iPad when Dirk walked into the room. "Just reading the news in the hopes that bores me to sleep."

"Is it working?"

"Not really. I found a riveting article about some douchelord they call Di-Stri. Apparently he updated his website for the first time in two months and no one knows why."

"Huh, I met the guy once and he was a total douchelord. Weird about the website though."

"Very strange indeed for someone who retired from the industry." 

"You think you'll be okay for work tomorrow?"

"And that's definitely another commendable effort to perfect the non-sequitur. I've gone in on worse than half a night's sleep before, I'll be fine."

"I'll drive you in the morning," Dirk said. He stepped out of his jeans and threw them into the 'still clean' pile in the corner. "Me 'n Dave were gonna come crash your afternoon gig anyway, there's no point taking two cars over there." 

"You sure?"

"Yeah, sometimes he likes staring at the animals when they're still alive."

"Good to hear," Jake said with a smile, leaning over to put the iPad away as Dirk pulled back the other half of the blankets. 

"Yeah, weird, I kno - fucking hell!" He got as far as folding them down off his pillow before he stopped. "Why the everloving fuck is that thing in here?"

Sitting beside Jake, resting between the pillows, was the skull that had belonged to his great grandfather. 

"No reason."

"Jake."

"What? I just feel a tiny bit of remorse for not introducing you sooner. He's already dead you know, he's rather harmless."

"Dude, get that thing outta there," Dirk said. He was still standing beside the bed, arms folded across his chest.

"Fine," Jake sighed exasperatedly, picking up the skull in one hand and placing it down on the bedside table next to his iPad. "Better?"

"Fuck no, get it out of here." 

"You're welcome to go and return him to his post in the lounge if you think that's necessary right now, but I'm rather comfortable and don't feel much like getting up again."

"Okay, I get it," Dirk said, letting his arms drop as he walked back out of the room. 

"You forgot the skull, Dirk. Dirk!"

"You think that shit's funny? Two can play at this game," Dirk replied from the room across the hall. He hadn't bothered turning any lights on for the trip. When he came back into the bedroom, it was with Cal perched on one shoulder. 

"Not a chance, you know the rules!" Jake exclaimed. "No puppets cross that threshold, no exceptions." 

"Dude, you've been cuddling with your dead grandpa's skull for over an hour, you can't take the moral high ground on this one."

Jake scowled as Dirk arranged Cal in the middle of the bed then finally climbed in beside him. 

"No puppets means no puppets, and I know you think Cal is an exception even to the laws of nature but he's really not."

"He's not leaving."

"Well fine," Jake said. "Grandpa can keep him company," he continued, returning the skull to the pillows.

"Come the fuck on!" 

"You started it."

"I'm not moving Cal."

"And I'm not moving grandpa," Jake said, looking down at both Cal and the skull which was once again wedged between himself and Dirk. "It's a classic stalemate, this."

"Fuck that." 

"Where are you going?"

"I'm not sharing with the skull," Dirk said, getting back out of bed and dragging his pillows with him. 

"Well I'm not sleeping with Cal in the bed."

"I'm sleeping on the couch."

"Not on my couch you're not!" Jake exclaimed, following Dirk across the bedroom.

"No, fuck, not the cinema couch, the lounge room couch."

"Good, because I thought I might take the cinema couch."

"Good for you."

They both knew they were acting like complete morons, but neither one was entirely sure just how serious the other was being and nor did they want to be the first to call the other's bluff. With pillows in hand, they both walked out into the hall only to find the attic stairs lowered and Dave sitting more than halfway up the ladder, looking boredly down at them from behind his glasses. 

"Jesus fucking Christ, dads, can't a guy get some fucking shut eye around here or do I have to call CPS?"

"Stop being an asshole and go to sleep," Dirk snapped.

"Stop yelling shit about skulls in the middle of the night," Dave shot back. 

"Don't you start too," he warned, reaching over to switch on the light in the living room. "Everyone just go the fuck to bed."

"Or?"

" _Dave!_."

"Okay, okay, I'm going, fuck," Dave surrendered, reaching up with both hands to lift himself back onto the edge of the attic floor. "So when's breakfast on work mornings?"

"About ten to five," Jake said from the other end of the hall. 

"Okay, so like ten? Awesome."

When Dave managed to get the ladder folded back up from the top, Dirk helped push it from below until it clicked back into place. 

"You heard what he just said as well, didn't you? The whole 'dads' thing, I mean," Jake pointed out, mildly shocked by the choice of words.

"Yeah, I heard. He's just being a little shit, it doesn't mean jack."

"No, I just meant that it's probably quite nice for you, really, even if he is deliberately being a discombobulating twat."

"He's been throwing it around like that for the last few months," Dirk shrugged. "No biggie." 

"Are you still planning on sleeping on the couch then?"

"I was gonna, yeah. Your dead grandpa's still on my side."

"Great grandfather. But fair enough," Jake shrugged. "Night."

"Yeah, you too."

Dirk switched off the hall light and moved into the living room, finally throwing his pillow down onto the couch while he looked around for a spare blanket. It took him a moment to remember that it was folded up on Cal's armchair, because he'd needed a boost to help him see the TV properly. He unfolded that as well, switched off the light, and finally settled down on the couch to try and sleep. 

The house was silent for a few minutes until Jake's voice called out through the darkness.

"Are you still driving me to work in the morning?"

+++

For Dave, the next few days went by faster than any week off school should. He wasn't about to admit it, but it had been a good call on Dirk's part to fly him in on short notice. They filled the hours with video game play-offs in the attic and made a few trips into the zoo to follow Jake on his rounds. At one point, they'd even snuck into a presentation with a group of elementary school students.

That hadn't worked out too well in the end. Jake had been called away last minute to check up on one of the tigers so they'd had to pretend they were actually interested in what his replacement was talking about for over half an hour. 

It was a nice break from being home alone with his mom. When she was home from her increasingly common business trips, she spent most of the day in her study working on one thing or another before the next inevitable meeting. Or, at least that was what she told him when he asked. More often than not, she was on the living room couch by the time he got home from school, watching whatever was playing on the TV or had most recently been recorded to the DVR and appeared at the top of the list. 

Her job was safe, she'd assured him one day in October when he'd asked. Work was fine. They were sending her all around the world to attend meetings and give lectures and she just needed some downtime at home. He could see that she was tired and he knew that as long as she could make it upstairs on her own at the end of the day, everything was still okay. 

When she hadn't been able to, he'd changed the terms of what constituted okay. 

Being in California, even just for a week, was the break he didn't even know he'd needed. Things had changed at home in the previous year and he was doing okay, but it was nice to be able to sit on the couch next to Dirk again while they just played shitty video games. They played online a lot, but it wasn't the same when there was close to three thousand miles stopping you from actively sabotaging the other person. Shoving Dirk to the side by kicking him in the face was the only way Dave had ever managed to win.

Jake, on the other hand, had only ever been good at two video games in his life: arcade light gun machines and FIFA.

"So what do I do here?"

"You just tap the screen, dude," Dave explained, leaning over the kitchen table and taking Jake's phone back off him to explain the game again. "Just keep tapping."

"Why?"

"Because if you don't the bird falls to his fucking death," he said, handing the phone back after another demonstration round.

"Is he a chicken?"

"Who?"

"This little bird in the game."

"What? No, he's just some dumb bird." 

"Then why can't he fly on his own?"

"What?"

"Birds fly, mate. This is hardly a useful bird if he can't fly."

Dave just stared at him, dumbfounded, until Dirk bringing a baking dish of his homemade mac and cheese over to the table released him from his stupor. 

"Bro," he whined. 

"Not my problem."

"But -"

"Not my problem, Dave. You put the game on his phone, you teach him how to play it. Getting him that piece of shit was the biggest mistake of my life because every fucking day there's something else wrong with it."

"I think it's broken," Jake said on cue, looking up after he died again. "I can't get past two of those pipe-like doohickys and the bird didn't fly anywhere near them."

"They're mostly user errors though," Dirk clarified.

"Yeah, no one can. It's a dumb game."

"Then why am I playing it?"

"Because it's a dumb game," Dave said. "That's the point."

"Okay, look, there's a giant fucking bowl of mac and cheese here and no one's eating it," Dirk said, finally sitting down in the chair next to Dave. He passed out two beers and a coke and just watched as Dave scraped off half the top layer of melted cheese and put it in his own bowl. 

"Anyhoo, what time's your flight tomorrow?" Jake asked, locking the screen of his phone and sitting it on the table beside the other two. He took the serving spoon from Dirk and start filling his own bowl with the pasta.

"Ten thirty but I don't get home until like six or something. Mom's picking me up," Dave said through a mouthful of mac and cheese.

"I wish I could see you off but I'll be at work then."

"Yeah, you're there a lot."

"That's because I'm a productive member of society, unlike some fellows I know," Jake said factually, nodding his head towards Dirk.

"It's not my fault normal guy jobs blow." 

"No, you just don't like the idea that you're now one of those normal guys. Your reign of musical insanity is over and you've got no idea how to function in the real world anymore," Jake explained, as if he was talking to a child who had already heard his reasoning half a dozen times but still refused to hear the point. "He really doesn't," he added, turning to Dave. "It's actually hilarious."

"Dude, he raised me in the middle of the fucking woods. I've never lived in the real world, I don't know what you were expecting from him."

"They were real woods," Dirk countered. 

"And you're a real douche."

" _Anyway_ ," Jake said emphatically. "The point is that I'll be long gone by the time you're leaving for the airport. Fancy watching a film properly tonight as something of a last hurrah?"

"What, you mean in the room of mystery that apparently not even Bro is allowed in?"

"Don't be daft, of course he's allowed in there. Just not unsupervised. But yes, that would be the one. And, since I'm feeling rather generous tonight, you can even take your coke in there and I might allow some chips."

"Holy shit," Dave said. "That's a pretty serious offer, dude. You know it's only like two weeks until Christmas, right? Like it's not like I'm not gonna see you guys for six months or anything."

"Oh, golly, no. If it were that long I'd let you pick the film."

"Whatever. So what are we watching?"

"Kick Ass 2."

"Seen it. It kinda blows."

"You wanna watch Frozen instead?" Dirk interrupted.

"That one you'd have to watch in the other room though," Jake pointed out.

"Let me seriously consider my options here for a minute," Dave said through a mouthful of mac and cheese. "It's either a no, a hell no, or a fuck no, but I'm not sure which one works better here."

"You already downloaded it, didn't you?" Dirk asked with a knowing grin.

"Mom made me watch it with her last week," he muttered. "She cried."

"It's a bloody Disney film," Jake said. 

"Yeah, that's why."

"Alrighty, well. Now that we've got all that sorted, I propose we finish up here, toss everything into the dishwasher, and get started so we can fit the entire movie in before I have to go to bed like the cranky old bastard I am."

Jake was only a little insulted when no one tried to insist that he wasn't cranky, old, or a complete bastard.

+++

"Hey, so, I wasn't gonna say anything because I think I already know the answer, but what the fuck happened to your Camry?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Yeah, that's what I thought," Dave said, rolling his eyes as he climbed up into the front passengers' seat of Dirk's truck. "Is there a reason this is obviously not the same truck you had in Houston either?"

"Yeah, because I need the one in Houston in Houston."

"Have you even been there in like six months?"

"Yeah," Dirk grunted. "Got everything?"

"Yeah. No, hang on," Dave said, lowering the window to take one last photo of the house with his cell phone. "Now I'm good."

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

"Asshole."

"Dude, don't even hate. You're gonna cry like a bitch when my plane takes off. You'll be standing there waving like a loser long after it's gone and then you'll cry so hard some rude-ass TSA agents will throw you out of the building before you flood the place."

"So?" Dirk asked, as he backed the truck out of the drive. "I'll just tell 'em my kid is flying back across the country. I won't have to make up jack shit and I'll still have the sympathy of every fucking parent in that terminal."

"Loser."

"Yeah, probably."

"Huh."

"What?"

"Nothing," Dave said quickly. "So am I getting anything awesome for Christmas or what?"

"I dunno. You need anything?"

"About ten more followers on my main blog before tonight to win a bet with Terezi."

"I'm not paying people off to follow your shitty blog."

"But you'll buy a whole new truck instead of driving the other one up from Texas?"

Dirk opened his mouth to reply but there was no real way to compare the fact he could literally just put up a twitter post advertising Dave's blog for free with the fact he'd dropped forty grand in cash on a car. 

"That's different," he said eventually, unable to think of a decent response.

"How?"

"Because shut the fuck up, Dave. That's why."

"Oh shit, sicknasty burn, Bro."

"You're an idiot."

"I'm not the one who bought a dumb-ass truck," Dave muttered. 

"Dave!"

"Okay!"

"But seriously, you need anything?" Dirk asked more casually, steering the conversation back to its original change of topic.

"Nah. Mom did the usual yearly 'replace everyone's underwear' thing last week," Dave explained.

Dirk snorted. Roxy had been doing that for over a decade. Originally, it had been out of necessity as the kids outgrew everything within six months when they were younger. But when they both hit their teenage years and she realised that Rose was even worse about asking for new underwear than Dave, she'd just kept replacing everyones in the leadup to Christmas. 

"Good to know."

"She sent Rosie a First Class package with a note reminding her to dump the old ones," Dave added. He had put his phone away not long after they'd left the house. It was only a short trip over to the airport and they were down to about two hours before his flight departed. He had no bags to check in and as long as he remembered to leave his skateboard strapped to his backpack in the terminal, he'd be fine. "Hey," he continued slowly. "So how long are you home for at Christmas?"

Dirk looked over at him, concerned by the sudden change in tone, when he pulled up at a red light. 

"Two weeks, give or take a few days. Jake's only coming until the day after New Year. Why?"

"You gonna be around on the third?"

"Yeah, I don't think I'm coming back until that weekend, why?"

"I've got an appointment with the Doc."

"Fuck, Dave. I thought you had some serious shit going down," Dirk said, taking off from the lights so quickly that he skipped straight from first into third. "It's just your usual checkup though, right?"

"Yeah, the last one was back in September."

"So what's the big deal?"

"The big deal is that the week before Thanksgiving I was out for two fucking days with those migraines, remember? He won't like that."

"Dude, what?"

"What do you mean 'what'? Mom told you," Dave said, confused. 

"No, she fucking didn't."

"She said she did."

"Well apparently she fucking forgot, didn't she?" Dirk said, struggling to keep his voice steady. "Spill."

"Okay, okay. So basically I got one at school after being outside for a Gym block, they sent me home, Mom picked me up, and I didn't go back until two days later because I had this kind of throbbing headache hang around for a while. It wasn't exactly news-worthy," Dave explained.

"Look, this is the kind of shit I need to know. Fuck, Dave, we went over this when I moved out here. You need to keep me filled in when shit goes wrong because it's a hell of a long flight to get back there to fix it. _You_ tell me. Not 'oh, mom said she'd tell you', you fucking tell me yourself," Dirk snapped, slamming the brakes at the next set of lights. The sudden motion caused Dave's seatbelt to lock up across his chest as he was thrown forward by the momentum.

"Dude, chill. It was just a migraine," he said, tugging at the seatbelt for some breathing room when the truck came to a complete stop. "Yeah, it freaked me out some but it's shit that happens all the time."

"I don't give a shit. You keep me in the loop. _You fucking personally_ keep me in the fucking loop. What the _fuck_ else has been going on that I don't know about?"

"I started a meth lab in your bathroom," Dave said so quickly that there was no way it wasn't a lie. Dirk didn't reply. He just raised a hand from the steering wheel and rubbed at his forehead before returning his attention to the road. "Okay, so I didn't start a meth lab. Sorry. It's actually a pot farm."

" _Dave_!"

"There's nothing else," he mumbled.

"You sure?"

"Yeah. Shit's fine. I post basically my entire life online, if it's not there it didn't happen," Dave said, forcing a grin.

Roxy hadn't told him. 

His mom had forgotten to tell her brother, who was living at the opposite end of the country to his kid, that something had gone wrong. 

The worst part was that Dave had no idea what she'd been doing for those two days. After she'd picked him up from school and they'd stopped twice on the drive home for him to throw up on the side of the highway, he'd slept for eleven hours. He'd woken up in the middle of the night, stayed awake long enough to have a shower, then gone back to sleep until morning. He'd spent the next day in his bedroom with the edges of his blinds taped down to the wall. Using his laptop, even on the lowest brightness, had still been too much so he'd set up some podcasts and listened to those while he tried to work on some sketches in the dark. 

When he went downstairs to find something to eat for the first time in almost thirty six hours, Roxy was asleep on the couch in the middle of the day. 

"Dave?"

He looked up when it registered that Dirk wasn't yelling anymore. 

"Huh?"

"You sure everything's okay?"

"Yeah, just finals and shit," he said, pulling the seatbelt loose across his chest. "It's gonna be a bitch to catch up on the shit I missed this week. College stuff, too."

"You gonna apply anywhere out here?"

"Huh?"

"There's plenty of good schools on this side of the country," Dirk pointed out. "It's worth thinking about, anyway."

"Dude, I'm getting sunburnt for the third time this week just sitting here and it's fucking December. I'm pretty sure this latitude kills guys like me in July."

"So that's a no?"

"Yeah, sorry."

"Nah, don't apologise. It saves me money the closer to home you stay."

"Since when do you give a shit about money?"

"Since always."

"Dude, you just flew me all the way out here on last minute fares."

"Yeah, and?"

"And they were hella expensive."

"What the hell are you talking about? I dropped less than two grand on those."

"That's exactly what I'm talking about!"

"Whatever," Dirk shrugged. "So where're you thinking about going?"

"Probably the city," Dave shrugged. "There's a few art schools there that might be cool. Sollux already has a place at NYU, so Karkat's trying to get in there as well. He's gonna teach me how to not get brutally murdered on the subway."

"Sollux got early admission? Impressive."

"Nah, MIT tracked him down but he didn't want to move the whole three hours up to Boston. Those guys that offered him a job want him to get a degree before they hire him, so he's gotta go somewhere."

"Who'd offer a juvenile convicted felon employment?"

"The government."

"Seriously?"

"I think so. He's not allowed to talk about it or some shit so I only know part of the story. They made him sign like six different nondisclosure agreements that all end in him getting thrown in federal prison if he fucks anything up."

"What did he even do?"

"I don't know, he signed nondisclosure agreements on that as well."

"Fuck," Dirk said.

"Yeah."

"You seriously don't know what he did?"

"I know he was only like fourteen the first time he got busted."

"The first time?"

"Yeah, he was out of school for like a year because of all the court cases."

"You think this shit this big would have been on the news."

"Nondisclosure agreements, dude. That's all that ever got out. Some smart-ass white kid fucked up some high level computer systems and then the story went dead. Anyway, he did something else last year because it technically didn't violate any of his court orders and he wanted to see if he could and that's when MIT tracked him down."

"So is that the cue for me to point out my complete and utter disappointment in the fact that you're mediocre at almost everything you do?"

"Yeah, go for it because I know that's bullshit. I'm awesome."

Dirk laughed. 

"But yeah, I'll drive you in for that appointment if you do something for me."

"Look, I really thought Mom told you, okay?" Dave sighed.

"Forget that. I'm not pissed at you, I'm pissed at her. I need some art by the twentieth."

"So what? You want me to plan a heist?" 

"That's exactly what I want you to do. I'll pull some strings and get you cell next to your evil genius friend in federal prison," Dirk offered. 

"Awesome, thanks. Bring me some smokes to trade for favors once a week and you've got a deal."

"Once a month is the best I can do. I'm a busy guy."

"Every two weeks."

"I just don't think you're worth that much effort."

"Every two weeks and I'll throw in a priceless artefact for you to hock on the black market for free," Dave said with a grin, finally looking over at Dirk in the drivers' seat to see if he was going to get a reaction to the fact that his feet were propped up against the dash.

"Now there's a deal I can't refuse. But seriously, you think that's enough time to get something done up?"

Apparently not.

"Yeah, probably. What do you want?"

"Something Christmasy."

"Like 'chestnuts and open fires' kinda Christmasy or 'shit Cal killed Santa' Christmasy?"

"Definitely the latter," Dirk grinned at the suggestion.

"What's it for?"

"You'll find out."

"Do I get paid?" Dave asked curiously.

"You get a free ride to college."

"Awesome, I'll do it."

"Nah, you get that anyway," Dirk pointed out. "Two percent to start with. I'll let you know if I want to reuse it and we'll go from there."

"Dude, you know you retired right? Because this sounds a lot like work for some asshole who retired like half a year ago."

"Yeah, but it's _Christmas_."

"Whatever. I'll get you some sketches by Thursday. That gives me over a week to make changes and finish it."

"Sounds good."

Dirk thought about shoving Dave's feet off the dashboard but they were less than five minutes away from the airport. He knew Dave was only sitting like that to see what he'd do about it. If he'd still had his old Camry, he would have gone apeshit for the entertainment factor but with everything that had transpired in the previous fifteen minutes, it seemed too trivial even for his shitty sense of humor. 

He parked in the lot and double checked the passengers' seat for lost items after Dave climbed out of the car. They'd made the trip in just over twenty minutes and there was still over an hour and a half before takeoff. As Dave started to walk on ahead, Dirk grabbed at the top of the skateboard that was strapped tightly to the front of his backpack. 

"Slow down, idiot."

"Look, no offence, but your coffee blows and I know for a fact there's like six Starbucks in there," Dave said, sidestepping out of reach. 

"How am I supposed to not be offended by that?"

"I dunno, I'm pretty sure I've said worse."

"True. When you were seven you told me that I smelt like a butt."

"Oh shit, seven year old me was a total asshole."

"Seventeen year old you is an even bigger asshole," Dirk pointed out. "And just for that bullshit about my coffee, you're buying me one when we get in there."

"Oh come on, no way."

"Do you want to win asshole of the year again?"

"You know you just gave me like a hundred bucks before we left your place, right?"

"Yeah, and I'm taking five back to get a shitty coffee."

"Whatever," Dave huffed, rolling his eyes as they walked into the terminal. He went straight for the self check-in machine and punched in his name on the touch-screen. "Hey, Bro, you sure I'm going back today?"

"Yeah, why?"

"Passenger not fucking found, that's why."

"Not possible. I went over your itinerary like six times this morning," Dirk said, looking at the screen over Dave's shoulder.

"Well it says right here, no matches. Look."

"Dave."

"What?"

"What's your legal name?"

It wasn't until Dirk pointed out the obvious that Dave realised he'd put Lalonde into the search system. 

"Fuck!" Dave swore.

"Hey, no big deal," Dirk said calmly, starting a new search for Strider instead. "Told you you're on this flight."

He finished the check-in process himself while Dave stood to the side, scowling heavily enough that combined with his dark glasses and generally scruffy demeanor for so early in the day, he was guaranteeing himself a full body pat-down once they reached security. He said as much when he handed over the boarding pass but all Dave did was lift his glasses long enough for him to receive the full brunt of the glare. 

Twenty minutes and an unnecessarily long wait in a Starbucks queue later, they finally sat down in the perpetually uncomfortable chairs just outside of security. 

"I was serious in the car before, you know," Dirk said as casually as he could manage. Dave watched as he carefully removed the lid to his coffee so he didn't have to deal with the inevitable leaks. 

"About what, planning a heist?" 

"Shit you shouldn't say in an airport."

"Huh?"

"I thought you were starting a game of Jeopardy." 

"You're a dick," Dave said flatly.

"Probably, but we knew that already. I meant about the schools out here."

Dave stopped mixing the whipped cream into his mocha frappuccino with the straw to look across at Dirk. 

He'd spent years detesting the fact that his vision only ever seemed to be getting worse, but once in a while he appreciated the side effect of never having to make eye contact unless he explicitly chose to lift his glasses.

When his uncle - father - had confirmed off live television that he was actually planning to move across the country to California, Dave's first question had been about his own future. Dirk had been quick to tell him there was no way they expected him to move as well, especially not since he'd been about to start his senior year of high school at the time. The option was put on the table, though, and every adult involved in the process had told him that it was ultimately his decision. 

Roxy would have been okay if he'd decided to go. Dirk was okay with him staying behind. Jake had assured him that they could make room for him and find him a school nearby. At the time, it had been easier to stay. Moving would have been slow and tedious and the school year would have been half over before everything settled down. He could cope with staying in New York alone half the time for a year. 

Then Dirk had actually moved and Rose had gone to college and he realised how often Roxy was actually away for work.

If he hadn't been so set on the idea of going to college in the city, he would have seriously considered moving out west. But as it was, he'd already filled in his applications and was almost finished with the portfolio he'd been working on for months and he wasn't exactly sure how to put any of that into words.

"I don't even like Mexican food," he said eventually. 

Dirk gave a loud snort of laughter.

"That's the best reason I've ever heard to avoid this part of the country," he said. "You know the one time you actually had Taco Bell down in Houston doesn't count as trying Mexican food, right?"

"I'm too white for spicy food."

"Very true."

"Hey, fuck you. It's your fault," Dave pointed out.

"Only half," Dirk protested. He sat his coffee on his knee and balanced it there while he checked his phone for the time. From the corner of his eye, he could see Dave struggling not to give in to the temptation to knock the paper cup over. "Do it. I dare you," he challenged. 

"Do what, man?"

They ended up locked in a silent battle to see who could hold out longer. Dave won, but only because after exactly fourteen minutes had passed, Dirk decided that drinking the rest of his coffee while it was still lukewarm was better than waiting for it to go cold.

When they called Dave's flight over the PA system for boarding, Dirk let him go with just a fistbump and a rough hair tussle. Two weeks was nothing in the scheme of things; coming back to San Diego after Christmas was going to be the hard part. He raised a hand to wave from outside security and Dave returned the gesture before turning to hurry off to his gate. Dirk watched until he disappeared around a corner then finally made a move to leave the terminal. 

He got three steps back towards the entrance before he pulled out his phone and dialled a familiar number. 

"Consider this your two week advance notice," he growled as soon as the line connected. "We are having some _serious_ fucking words when I get back over there. If you're not right at that fucking gate to pick him up tonight, and I mean inside the fucking building where he can see you as soon as he walks in, I'm promising you _right fucking now_ that it'll be more than just words."

+++

When he stepped out onto the tarmac at Watertown, Dave shivered against the freezing winds that whipped his bangs up behind his glasses. He zipped up his hoodie as he walked down the stairs, looking down at where he was going to avoid the worst of the glare until his eyes adjusted. He dug his hands deep into his pockets and followed the small crowd through into the terminal building and away from the wind.

"Hi, baby."

Roxy was waiting for him like she'd promised she would be, leaning one shoulder against the wall beside the bubblegum dispenser that Dave hadn't seen anyone use in over ten years. He walked straight over and wordlessly let her pull him into a one-armed hug, burying his face against her shoulder. 

He was home. 

She was sober.

Two weeks was nothing.


	2. [A4A2]: its christmas up in this bitch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there are ups and downs for everyone at Christmas.

**December, 2013**

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering timaeusTestified [TT] at 09:38 --

TG: hey so are you busy right now  
TG: because this isnt exactly important or anything  
TG: but its hella weird and i dont think i can wait another ten hours to ask you about it   
TT: What happened?   
TG: and im into a lot of weird shit so you know when i say weird i mean weird   
TT: Dave, what happened?   
TG: seriously bro   
TG: shit is off the fucking charts weirder than an episode of hoarders   
TT: I'm going to punch you in the throat when I land if you don't just tell me what happened.   
TG: dude way to fly off the fucking handle  
TG: thats some kind of fucked up child abuse right there  
TG: i dont know officer all i said was i needed to tell him something and he punched me  
TG: parental figure of the year right there   
TT: Your next line better explain what this is about so choose your words wisely.   
TG: someone mailed me a box of dead animals

\-- timaeusTestified [TT] ceased being pestered by turntechGodhead [TG] at 09:41 --

It took Dirk all of three seconds to switch out Pesterchum for a phone call.

"And you thought pestering me about that shit was the best way to go about it?"

"Dude, I thought you'd be driving or something."

"Jake's got a parking permit for the airport so we get a discount, he's driving. Look, that's not the point. What the fuck do you mean they mailed you a box of dead animals?" 

"Dead animals?" Jake asked, turning away from the road. "Oh, goody! Put him on speaker, would you?"

"You're involved in this? Of course you're fucking involved in this." Dirk said, raising an eyebrow. He hooked up his phone to the car bluetooth and put it down in the console. "Look, you're on speaker."

"Dude, why?"

"Because Jake got this crazy look on his face when I said 'dead animals' and let me tell you, if anyone he works with ever sees that face, they'd probably fire him on the spot."

"Oh, shut up. You got the package then, mate?" Jake asked, raising his voice a little on the question to make sure the phone picked up what he was saying. 

"Yeah, I got it alright," Dave said. "It was either you or Kanaya and I don't think Rose's girlfriend would get me a box of dead shit for Christmas."

"How'd you narrow that down?" Dirk asked.

"The return address says Berkshire."

"That would indeed be my parents!"

"You had your parents post my kid a box full of dead shit?"

"I did nothing of the sort."

"Then why does my kid have a box of dead shit from your parents?"

"I just mentioned that he collects that sort of thing. I didn't know what else to suggest they send over. They told me last week it was on its way so I'll have to tell them it arrived in time," Jake said. "Have you taken a gander inside yet?"

"Yeah, it's pretty awesome. So who sent it?" Dave asked. Dirk could hear him rummaging through something and then the sound of jars clinking together. 

"My mum and dad. They wanted to get you something this year."

"Okay, that's cool as dicks and all but why the hell would they buy me shit for Christmas?" Dave asked. They could hear him walking around his room, his voice occasionally dropping out of range of his phone. 

"They thought it might be nice is all."

"Okay, look, we're pulling into the airport now," Dirk said, picking up his phone again. "I'll text you when we hit Chicago."

"Okay."

"Who's coming to pick us up?"

"Me."

"We'll see you in a few hours then," he said, disconnecting the call after Dave said goodbye. 

"We're still ages away from the airport, what are you talking about?" Jake asked, glancing away from the traffic to look over at Dirk again. "Dirk?"

"The first Christmas I had Dave, he'd just turned four," Dirk said, resting an elbow against the window. "I'd had him in New York for about six months by then. Fuck, by Christmas he was starting to put sentences together, real sentences I mean, not the stunted ones he'd been using for months. Christ, back then you could tell where he'd been living before. Those stupid videos you take at work of baby animals have nothing on a toddler with a Southern accent, I'm telling you that now. He was small, too, fucking ridiculously small for a kid his age. The clothes my parents sent him for Christmas that year wouldn't have even fitted an average eighteen month old. When he turned ten they thought he was seven and when he was fourteen they thought he was sixteen. They've met him twice. And then out of nowhere, your parents, who've never had anything to do with him and don't even know what he looks like, send him a box of shit that he fucking loves?"

"If you like, we can count that as my gift for you these holidays. I haven't exactly got you anything yet. I was kind of hoping a nice fridge magnet from Chicago would do the trick," Jake said. 

"Yeah, I think we can count establishing a set of pseudo-grandparents as a Christmas gift."

"They sent him a badger skull."

"Don't ruin the moment, Jake."

+++

"How, Rox? How the _fuck_ does something like that just slip your mind?"

"Shh," Roxy hissed, sliding the glass door to the balcony closed behind her. 

"No, don't give me that shit. He knows that you forgot because I lost my shit at him for not telling me he spent half a week out of school with a fucking migraine!" Dirk exclaimed. "I lost my absolute shit at _him_ for something _you_ did!"

Dirk had warned her two weeks earlier that he was angry. She'd assumed, at the time, that two weeks was more than long enough for him to calm down. It wasn't even a big deal. They'd all been dealing with Dave's migraines since he was ten and he knew what to do when they hit. As far as she knew, he'd slept it off. She vaguely remembered promising him that she would take care of calling her brother to pass on what had happened, but she had no recollection of actually making the call.

She'd assumed that she had. 

She had no real recollection of anything that happened after she got Dave home from school that afternoon. 

"I'm sorry, but I really did think I'd told you!"

"Well you didn't, Rox," he said, the roughness of his words muffled by the cigarette between his lips as he tried in vain to keep the lighter on long enough for the spark to catch. Eventually, he just stepped back into Roxy's bedroom to light the cigarette and closed the door again when he walked back out onto the balcony. "How'd you even forget something like that?"

"I don't know. I've got work coming out of my ass at the moment and they've had me basically circle the globe twice since September. I've been working on Geneva's timezone for weeks and I don't even know what day it is half the time, let alone the hour," she said, trying to keep her voice steady. With Dirk already in the state he was in, the last thing anyone else needed was her flying off the deep end with him. She watched him try to do the same, as he took a slow drag and eventually exhaled through his nose.

"You didn't call. You promised him that you'd call me and you didn't and then you didn't tell me over Thanksgiving."

"Because I thought I already had," she said, feeling almost as if she was begging for him to believe that something like that could just slip her mind. "Dirk, please. It's a non-issue. He's fine."

"He's my kid, Rox. You promised me that you'd look after him."

"Don't start that shit, he's as good as mine. I got him home, I refilled his codeine supply, I made sure he was okay. I did everything we usually do when this shit happens. I just forgot to make a fucking phone call," Roxy snapped, arms folding tightly over her chest.

"Are you okay?" 

"What?"

"You. Are you okay?" Dirk asked, ashing his cigarette over the edge of the balcony. 

"Peachy," she replied. "Tired. Overworked. Pissed off because my baby brother thinks I deliberately tried to fuck him over."

"I need to know this shit, Rox. I need to know when it happens. When he told me that he'd been out for two fucking days, you know how god damn guilty I felt about moving three thousand miles away? I moved clear across the country from my kid because _I_ wanted to move. He got no say in that because it was happening whether he liked it or not. And let me promise you, that was a hell of a lot more guilt than I ever felt over going out to Houston for six weeks."

"I said I'm sorry and I'll say it again, Dirk. Look, they've got me back in Europe next month and then I've just got domestic travel until March. You know what it's like travelling so much, I'm just completely exhausted. I forgot to change my bra for three days last week for Christ's sake."

"Classy."

"Tell me about it," she said, chancing a grin. 

He responded with what was almost a grimace.

"You've got no idea how much I need you to tell me all the shit that's going on over here."

"I kinda do. Remember when Rosie was eleven, I was in London, and she -"

"Rox, we are not revisiting that experience now."

"It was hilariously disastrous."

"No."

"Like I know you've always been opposed to ladybits but you sat through the same sex ed classes as everyone else."

"Yeah, back in the middle school. What else was I supposed to do?"

"You took the poor girl to Walgreens and asked someone for help _while she was there with you_."

"I'll say it again, what else was I supposed to do?"

"Anything but that!"

"Yeah, well, we called it a lesson in resilience," Dirk said. He dropped his cigarette to the concrete floor and crushed it with the heel of his shoe. "Look, just start writing all this shit down or something."

"I'll special order a notepad designed to take your messages and your messages only."

"That's not passive aggressive bullshit or anything. You sure you're okay?"

"You mean other than the fact I'm literally freezing my ass off out here?"

"Fine. But just remember, the next time he tells me shit went down and I don't know about it within twenty four hours, I'm installing surveillance cameras in the house."

"Yeah, that's not crazy and over the top or anything," Roxy said, mocking her brother as she slid the door open again. 

He just stared her down in response and she knew he was absolutely nowhere near fucking around.

This was the guy who had been incapable of taking middle school classes that didn't provide him with a full syllabus in the first lesson, who had mapped out entire semesters right down to blocks devoted to 'general fuckassery' in high school. 

She'd seen him swipe an entire desk's worth of belongings out his bedroom window in the eleventh grade because their mother had cleaned his room one day and put his capacitors in the wrong drawer. 

She had witnessed him micromanaging every move of his career to the point where his producer had threatened to walk out on him, more than once, because he wouldn't let the guy just do his job. He ran his own website, responded to his own messages, had had the final say in what got released and when. 

She didn't doubt for a second that he would do whatever it took to keep as close an eye as possible on Dave from California. 

Roxy just gave a defeated sigh and gestured for Dirk to walk back inside. He went on ahead of her and she followed him back through the house, picking up Mutie from the stairs on her way down to the kitchen. 

"So were you stashing my Christmas gifts with the ones Mom got me?" Dave asked when Dirk dropped down onto the living room couch beside him. 

"That's exactly what I was doing."

"Awesome. I'll just follow the yellow, nicotine-stained road to find them."

"Don't even start that shit with me."

"You started it."

"So when's Rosie getting here?" 

"She's driving up tomorrow morning. Kanaya flies out this afternoon."

"You know you're about to die, right?"

"Huh?"

When Dave finally tore his eyes away from the TV, it was in the middle of hijacking a car. Dirk gave a sharp burst of laughter and snatched the controller from his hands, intent on completing the mission himself. Dave made a grab for the controls but Dirk held them out of reach and elbowed him aside so he could shift over to be directly in front of the screen. 

"I can't believe you haven't even finished story mode yet," he said. 

"Dude, I got it like a month late and I don't give enough of a shit to finish it all in two days."

"Lame."

"Whatever. Jake was looking for you while you were tearing Mom a new one," Dave said from his new position on the couch, lying with his head hanging off the edge to watch Dirk play upside down.

"You know she's behind you, right?"

"Bullshit."

"Not bullshit," Roxy said bluntly, dropping Mutie over the couch so he landed on Dave's chest. "Sorry, baby, but you'll have to try harder to sneak something like that past Momma."

While Jaspers would have immediately dug his claws into the nearest surface, regardless of that being human flesh or not, Mutie just collapsed in a heap to absorb the impact then started licking at the bottom of Dave's chin. 

"Oh gross dude, quit it," Dave yelped, trying to push the cat aside before he squirmed his way off the couch. Mutie, assuming it was a game, just swatted at his nose and soon enough he was all but engaged in what Roxy would later call _the cutest little fistfight_ she'd ever seen. 

In the end, the cat won. 

He hissed at Dave for shoving him too hard and sprinted out of sight. Dave flipped himself right side up and called out something about liking Paul better anyway, then added an apology to Paul because of course he loved her more than Mutie.

Roxy seemed to be amused by his display, but Dirk just elbowed him repeatedly until he stopped with the theatrics. He made a half-hearted attempt to snatch the controller back again but gave up when Dirk shoved him aside. He rolled off the edge of the couch and flopped down on the armchair instead; if he'd actually been invested in GTAV, he would have finished it long before Christmas. 

When he stretched out his legs and propped his feet up on the coffee table, Mutie came back and jumped up into his lap. Instead of riling him up this time, Dave just scratched at his head until he was purring softly and starting to doze off. 

"Oh, there you are," Jake said, walking through to the kitchen when he came up from the basement. "Have you been here long?"

"Nah, just a few minutes. Sup?"

"Well, you know how you suggested two days ago that I start packing lest I forget something blatantly obvious?" 

"What did you forget?"

"Essentially everything that lives in the bathroom."

"You wanna go into town, right?"

"Is there time?" Jake asked. "It's already dark out."

"Walgreens is open until ten," Dave said, still scratching softly behind Mutie's ears. "Dude, how'd you get three stars?"

"Ran over some guy or six," Dirk shrugged, exiting the game before he finished the mission. "You want this on?"

"Nah, I'll just watch TV."

"Anyone want anything?"

Dave caught the remote when Dirk threw it over and switched the input to the DVR and started looking through everything they had recorded. 

"Cookies or some shit," Dave said. He'd settled on an old episode of _Breaking Bad_ , even though Roxy had given away the ending before he'd managed to catch up. He'd threatened to run away from home if she told him what happened over breakfast the morning after the finale aired, but she had anyway because they both knew there was no way he'd run away without taking Paul with him.

"Well, the liquor store is closed so there's nothing I want that you can pick up," Roxy said with a laugh, sitting down on the couch where Dave had been previously. 

"You seriously expect me to believe that it's the day before Christmas Eve and you haven't got a fully stocked cabinet?" Dirk asked, raising a careful eyebrow at his sister's exaggerated laugh.

"Of course I do you moron, what do you think this is if not the infamous house of Lalonde?"

"Any particular biscuits, mate?" Jake asked as he checked all of his pockets until he found his wallet. 

"Nah, whatever you see first. And a case of Dr. Pepper and some Pringles. Oh, shit, and strawberry pop tarts. I've got like three left," Dave said without looking away from the TV. "You want my keys?"

"Nah, we'll take the van," Dirk said. "I don't want to end up dead."

"But you'll let me drive that heap of shit?"

"You're a kid. We could throw you off the roof and you'd bounce back."

"That's not what you said that time I tried to flip out of the tree out back."

"Yeah, I lied. Sorry, dude." Dirk made as if to flip Dave's glasses up as he walked past, but settled on scruffing up his hair instead when he dodged the attack. "We'll be back in a while."

Roxy waited until she heard the garage door close before she spoke again. 

"Hey, so partly because I'm supposed to love you and all that soppy shit and partly because I'm just nosing around, do you talk to him as much as you used to?"

"I just spent a week on the other side of the country with him," Dave said flatly. "I mean, I said exactly jack shit the entire time I was there, I was like some fucking silence ninja or something. As soon as that plane flew across the state border into California I was all well fuck, there go my talking privileges for a full week."

"I mean this in the nicest way possible, baby, but the fact you've got any friends at all astounds me every day. I meant before Thanksgiving."

"I pester him about shit most days," Dave shrugged. "He calls sometimes, mostly when he thinks I'm talking too much shit on Pesterchum though. Why?"

"No reason, baby," Roxy said, standing up from her place on the couch. She stopped by Dave long enough to brush out the mess Dirk had made of his hair with her fingers, before heading back through to the kitchen to pour herself a well-deserved drink.

+++

"You're much more tolerable as a brother when you're asleep."

"Fuck off."

"It's a wonder that you find the time to sleep for so many hours a day with your schedule as jam packed with blogging and sub-par trolling as it is."

"Fuck off."

"It's after two o'clock, Dave."

"Fuck off."

"Are you going to stay under there for yet another hour?"

"Fuck off."

"I almost get the feeling you're not happy to see me."

Rose's lips twisted up into a smile as Dave summoned enough energy to reach a hand out from under the covers and flip her off. 

She watched as his hand then groped blindly for whichever pair of glasses was nearest. Finally, he connected with the black plastic frames of an old pair of Wayfarers, which disappeared back under the covers along with his hand. 

It was still another few minutes before he emerged from beneath the pile of blankets. He dragged them down to reveal the glasses on his face, her clips in his bangs, and Mutie dozing on his chest.

"Why're you here?" Dave mumbled, running a hand up through his hair.

"Because despite being given an out when I started college, I just can't tear myself away from this sorry excuse of a family during the holidays."

"In my room," he added, irritated as he flicked the clips at her. 

"Oh, that," Rose said flippantly, moving from Dave's desk chair to sit on the end of his bed. The shift in weight woke the kitten, who yawned widely in Dave's face and stalked over to Rose instead. "The so-called adults were behaving like children."

"Mario Party?"

"Mario Party," she sighed.

"Who's winning?"

"Mom."

"Huh," Dave mused, finally deeming himself awake enough to justify sitting up. 

"You're surprised?"

"Yeah. It's two in the afternoon."

"And?"

"And what?" 

"Is there anything unique about this time of day when it comes to Mario Party skills?"

"Huh? Nah. Shit, I just woke up, give me a minute here,' he muttered, quickly trying to cover up his own curiosity. He was getting so used to Roxy being asleep in the afternoons that the idea of her both sober and conscious enough to play video games at that time of day was perplexing. Rose raised a questioning eyebrow but she had no way of knowing for sure that he'd seen the movement. "I need to piss."

"It's amazing how quickly one adjusts to not hearing an announcement for every bodily function throughout the day."

"You want me to start texting you every time I take a shit?"

"I'll admit that I do find it oddly charming that you'd think of me so often."

Dave gave a weak smirk as he fell out of bed, stumbling on his first few steps of the day. He'd been up until almost six in the morning working on the last of his Christmas commissions and there was no way he was going to be late with those. He'd sent out the digital copies at six thirty then collapsed into bed, knowing that if he waited until he woke up he'd want to edit the illustrations even further before he released them. 

He picked up his phone from where he'd left it on the floor the night before and took it with him into the bathroom, one-handedly replying to Karkat's increasingly aggravated pesterlog that had last been updated over an hour ago. 

Then he sent Rose a Snapchat of the bathroom wall, captioned with just the word _multitasking _.__

__She sent one back of her socks, telling him to politely go and suck a dick._ _

__In retaliation, he left the toilet unflushed and snuck back past his own open bedroom door, creeping downstairs near silently so that she wouldn't realise he'd gone. It was hilarious in his head even though the prank would achieve little more than giving Rose the quiet she needed to continue reading her book uninterrupted for a few more minutes. She wouldn't miss him and he knew it but he still felt like she deserved it for waking him up so early._ _

__Or late. Whatever._ _

__He was feeling pretty smug about the whole thing until he made it into the kitchen and found his sister already sitting at the table._ _

__"Pop tart?" Rose offered, holding up the foil package without looking away from her novel._ _

__"Fuck you to the depths of hell and back you vindictive bitch," he said. He took the proffered toaster pastry from her regardless._ _

__"Eloquent."_ _

__"I thought so."_ _

__"What do you do without me here to listen to your inane horseshit every hour of the day?"_ _

__"Fuck you," he said. He took a seat across the table from his sister with the pop tarts and a juice box from the fridge._ _

__"Please don't."_ _

__"Now who's the one throwing around more horseshit than a brony convention?"_ _

__"Not quite your best metaphor but the intentions were good."_ _

__"Gimme an hour to wake up," he said, speaking through a mouthful of chewed up pop tart._ _

__"Morning, baby," Roxy said, patting his hair as she walked past the table. He didn't reply, gesturing to the mouthful of pastry when she looked over to see why he was so quiet._ _

__Rose tweaked an eyebrow when she noticed that he was intently watching their mother pour herself a glass of orange juice, but she didn't say anything._ _

__"Hi, Mom," he finally said, acknowledging her presence after taking another bite of his pop tart._ _

__"Were you planning on sleeping right through Christmas or something? Because I gotta say, that's not like you at all. I even got everything to make those ginger sugar cookies that you pack away by the dozen, and I am so god damn prepared I got enough to make like six batches."_ _

__"Was tired."_ _

__"Serves you right for staying up all night."_ _

__"It was still dark when I went to sleep."_ _

__"It doesn't count if its already today when you go to bed."_ _

__"Whatever," Dave said, pushing his chair out as he stood up from the table. He took the pop tart packaging between his teeth so his hands were free to carry his phone and juice. "You need me to do anything?"_ _

__"Baby, relax, would you? It's Christmas Eve."_ _

__"Christmas isn't until tomorrow," he replied._ _

__"Well the short answer's no, not right now. I'm totally on top of everything," Roxy said. She walked up beside Dave and pulled him into a tight hug, swaying him from side to side. "Promise, baby," she added quietly, pressing a kiss to the side of his head._ _

__She let him go after that. With a nearly imperceptible nod of her head, she gave him all the permission he needed to return to his bedroom. She sighed when he left and topped up her glass, oblivious to the fact it was already more vodka than orange juice._ _

__Her son wasn't supposed to be the one looking after her._ _

__"Am I missing something?" Rose asked carefully as her mother took Dave's place at the table._ _

__"Oh, who'd even know? I did something or said something to him last week and he's been shitty ever since," Roxy lied. "It might've been after he went to that party."_ _

__"Our Dave _voluntarily_ went to a party?" Rose asked incredulously._ _

__"After his last track meet," she nodded. "He didn't get home until almost two in the morning."_ _

__"Are you sure it was him?"_ _

__"He devoured everything edible in the house the next morning so it was definitely him."_ _

__"Stranger things have happened," Rose mused aloud._ _

__"Name three."_ _

__"Bro didn't bring Cal home with him."_ _

__"I don't think that was a voluntary decision, hun," Roxy snorted into her glass._ _

__"It's never happened before."_ _

__"Okay, you've got one. Two more."_ _

__"Can I use examples from anywhere in the world or do the instances have to relate directly to this family?"_ _

__"In the family, definitely."_ _

__"Then I think I have to concede defeat," Rose admitted with a small sigh. She shifted a little at the table, bringing her feet up to rest on the edge of her chair. "So, considering how much we all know he adores that puppet, what do you assume my dear uncle was threatened with that convinced him to leave the Devil's plaything in California for over a week?"_ _

__"Now there's a conversation I'm never having with my daughter," Roxy smirked over the edge of her glass._ _

__"Don't be crass."_ _

__"You're the one that asked the question, Rosie, and I'm pretty sure we both know the answer."_ _

__"I was simply wondering if you think he's still carrying on like a madman now that he's escaped the isolation of the woods."_ _

__"Of course he is. He's just doing it in a different timezone."_ _

__"Point taken," Rose said. "Now that we've established that, what's wrong with Dave?"_ _

__"He's got a stick up his butt about something," Roxy shrugged. "Check his blogs, he's more likely to tell everyone on the internet before he tells me."_ _

__"That's not entirely true. Do you ever look at his blogs?"_ _

__"You think I seriously want to see the kind of things my seventeen year old son posts on the internet?"_ _

__"He's very careful about what he says online," Rose said. "Don't get me wrong, there's so much bullshit that you need a shovel to get through it when he's on a roll, but it's very rarely personal. Yes, there are countless photos of him and even more of Paul, but he never says much. Karkat's the only one of his friends who knows that he's very closely related to Di-Stri and I think even he's still convinced that he's Dave's biological uncle. I could be wrong. At the very least, he knows there's a connection between them. He doesn't post the photos of either of you publicly, with the exception of the few that find their way to Facebook. It's all rather unsurprising if you think about it."_ _

__"And that's supposed to make me feel better?"_ _

__"Would you rather hear that he's been posting grainy cell phone photos of his own d-"_ _

__"I don't want to know," Roxy interrupted before Rose could finish her statement._ _

__"He hasn't, for the record."_ _

__"And you'd know?"_ _

__"I would have found out by now."_ _

__"Can we _please_ change the subject, hun? Not to be a total downer or anything but this whole conversation is getting too weird even for all the other shit this table has heard over the years," Roxy said. "There's some shit we really just shouldn't talk about, and I mean ever."_ _

__Rose started talking about school after that. She spoke to her mother on the phone a few times a week, mostly during the evenings when she needed a break from her homework. Sometimes Roxy sought Dave out in the afternoons or on weekends and they would sit together on the couch to Skype her for a while. She wouldn't tell them, but she appreciated the extra effort that went into coordinating those calls. Kanaya could see it, without even needing to be told, and would excuse herself from their room so that Rose could have time alone with her family._ _

__She was smart but she was still young. Both she and Dave had started school before their fifth birthdays and had perpetually been the youngest in their respective grades. It hadn't made a big difference back then. While she had always been academically gifted and her uncle had put in a monumental effort to make sure Dave was at the right developmental stage for his age before he started kindergarten, they had both done well enough at school._ _

__College was a completely different challenge._ _

__She wasn't failing by any means, but she was struggling more than she'd anticipated. The standard of work that usually got her A's was now a B at best and she was growing increasingly frustrated with her inability to improve._ _

__Roxy did her best to reassure her daughter. It was her first semester in college and she was attending a school well known for being challenging. The fact that she was already sitting on a B-average was impressive enough in its own right._ _

__Rose nodded as her mother spoke, recalling tales of her own college failures as she worked her way through the glass of orange juice strong enough to strip paint from the walls by the fumes alone. She acknowledged the stories with careful interest, asking enough questions to prompt Roxy to go on but not enough to force her to go off on an unrelated tangent._ _

__Roxy had no idea how much Rose was absorbing. She had that look on her face, the one she knew so well, that told her that her daughter was lost in her own thoughts and nothing would be able to draw her back until she was ready._ _

__When Rose finally left the table, excusing herself to go and find her brother, she was replaced by Dirk who slipped into her place and didn't hesitate to just reach over and take the remaining quarter of the glass for himself._ _

__Roxy tried to look annoyed but that only encouraged him to drain the juice instead of leaving her some. She did laugh when coughed, evidently not expecting it to be as strong as it was. He accused her of being a drunk and she brushed the comment off, standing to refill the glass. She plucked a beer from the fridge while she was up and slid it across the table to Dirk when she returned to her seat._ _

__"So don't tell anyone I asked and by anyone I totally mean Rosie, but what the hell convinced you to leave your precious little puppet in California all on his lonesome?"_ _

__Dirk gave a snort of laughter and knocked back three mouthfuls from his bottle before responding._ _

__"Like hell I'd tell you."_ _

__"Like hell you wouldn't."_ _

__"It's too depraved even for your precious little ears."_ _

__"Oh please, as if there's things you've done that I haven't."_ _

__He just raised an eyebrow at that one. He could think of a few things off the top of his head, not that he was going to point that out._ _

__"Nah, it's totally boring."_ _

__"Did he threaten to divorce you?"_ _

__"We're not married."_ _

__"Did he threaten to marry you first?"_ _

__"Yeah, because that'd totally be the worst consequence for anything."_ _

__"Jesus Christ, would you just get it over and done with? You're forty fucking two years old and you've been at this for like eight years now, so don't tell me you're just waiting to see how he turns out before you make any rash decisions, like moving clear across the country for him."_ _

__"Like you're any better," Dirk shot back, changing the subject._ _

__"I'm doing better than you."_ _

__"Shut up, Rox."_ _

__"So what did he threaten you with? Because let's face it, that hellspawn is never more than three feet away from you if you can help it."_ _

__"He said he'd cancel the cable subscription."_ _

__Roxy gave a shriek of laughter then, because the look on her brother's face told her that he was being entirely serious._ _

__At least he grinned as well._ _

____

+++

"Dirk?"

"Time?"

"Half seven."

"Too early."

"We've had a three hour lie-in."

"You have. I always go back to bed."

"It's Christmas morning."

"Kids won't be up 'til lunch."

"I'm positively starving."

"Food's in the kitchen."

"Dirk?"

"Mmhm?"

"I love you."

"Cheap trick, English."

"Yes, but did it work?"

"I'm still deciding."

Dirk yawned loudly and rolled over onto his back. The twisting motion caused his spine to crack in three places as he shifted around, reaching blindly for his phone to confirm that it was only seven thirty in the morning. 

He could see Jake's point about sleeping in. On workday mornings his first alarm went off at four thirty and he was gone less than an hour later. But while he left for work after breakfast, Dirk would go back to bed and sleep until mid-morning to make up for the hours he was awake at night.

He knew that Jake considered sleeping past six to be a horrendous waste of time when there was so much else to do, but he'd figured that December 25th would be an exception.

It was the first time in their eight years together that they had woken up on the same end of the continent on Christmas morning.

"Well?" Jake pressed.

"No. You took a leap of faith and dove head first into a colossal failure. Not even a declaration of your undying and everlasting love for me is enough to make me even consider the concept of being awake for another hour, at least," Dirk said, grinning the entire time. 

"You talk a lot of nonsense, you know that?"

"I was trying to bore you to sleep."

"I meant about the 'undying and everlasting love' garbage. When has any real person said that outside the obvious context of any Hugh Grant film ever made?" 

"I was pandering to the heart of a movie aficionado."

"Oh, well in that case consider me wooed," Jake laughed.

He didn't bother looking up from his online newspaper though.

"Anything happening?"

"The usual load of nothing relevant to anything."

"No surprises there."

Jake looked up in surprise when he heard a shout from out in the hall, but Dirk didn't even raise an eyelid.

"Should we be concerned by that?"

"It's just Dave."

"Yes, but does he usually make such a cracking effort to wake up the entire neighbourhood this early?"

"So you're admitting seven thirty is early?"

"What? No. Well, I suppose in context it can be early, because while I'm usually up to my elbows in goat carcasses around this time of day, I don't think the same goes for your boy."

"I think he's got a goat fetus in a jar somewhere."

"Yes, but the point stands, doesn't it? When was the last time he went about shouting at this hour of the morning?"

"Try all you want but I'm not getting up."

"Not even if Dave's in mortal peril?"

"The minute he's in mortal peril I'll get up and fuck the time of day. But that wasn't his _I'm in mortal peril_ scream, it was more like his _the cat walked in on me taking a piss_ scream. He'll get over it and go back to bed and we won't see him until this afternoon," Dirk muttered. He'd turned onto his side again and pulled the covers up over his shoulders, giving every indication that he was serious about trying to go back to sleep. 

Jake was silent for a few minutes then. He dropped a hand from his iPad and balanced the device on his knee, absent-mindedly running his freed-up fingers through Dirk's hair.

He waited another few minutes until Dirk's breathing had slowed once again.

"What was the earliest he ever woke up on Christmas?"

"This is blatant emotional manipulation and you know it."

"I'm aware."

"Four."

"Four what?"

"He got up at four the Christmas he was six," Dirk clarified, turning onto his back again. "His first Christmas here, he didn't even know what gifts were. Then when he was five, he slept until nine because it was a day off school and the first six months of kindergarten completely wiped him out. But by the time he was six, he had a pretty good grasp on the concept of a bearded man breaking into the house to leave free shit in the living room."

"As most kids undoubtedly do."

"Why're you so interested all of a sudden?"

"Oh, pish posh, it's not _all of a sudden_ ," Jake said, waving a hand dismissively. "I've always liked hearing you talk about him."

"Hey, I can remember you telling me to shut up about him."

"That happened all of once, you buffoon. And I only said it because to be quite honest, hearing about an eleven year old with gastroenteris isn't the _nicest_ dinner conversation, especially when you're out having one last meal before you head back across the country from your partner for an indeterminate amount of time."

"Still counts."

"Insufferable twat."

"That's not what you said ten minutes ago," Dirk laughed as he looked up at Jake, who just raised an eyebrow in response. 

"The fact that I do love you, however inexplicable that fact might be, and that you're an insufferable twat aren't mutually exclusive bits of information."

"Kind of like how it's both too early to get up and too late not to?"

"No, that's definitely a case of Schrodinger's Clock," Jake said. "I could really go a cup of tea about now though."

Dirk groaned loudly and finally sat up, but not without making sure it looked like a monumental effort. He made a show of yawning widely then slouched forwards, rolling his shoulders a few times before ending the display with a loud crack of his neck.

"Morning," he said through another yawn. 

"Happy Christmas," Jake replied. He watched on, amused, as Dirk struggled not to take half the sheets with him on his way to the bathroom. "Oh, for Pete's sake!"

"What?" 

"You could at least close the door."

"Nothing you haven't seen before."

"I'm going to put the kettle on," he said exasperatedly, finally moving from the bed himself. He heard Dirk give a soft snort of laughter a moment later, when he was trying to pull a t-shirt over his head.

"Stop. Stop, it's caught on your glasses."

"How the blooming heck did that happen?"

"You tell me," Dirk said, helping to disentangle the fabric from the frames. "Seriously, what the fuck?"

"I don't know," Jake scowled. "It's not the first time," he added.

"Yeah, that's where the what the fuck comes into it. Shirt first, then glasses. It's not rocket science."

"Well usually it doesn't matter, does it? My work shirts button up the front."

"Breakfast?" Dirk asked, handing Jake's glasses back once he'd managed to sort out his shirt.

"I hope you washed your hands."

"Did you hear any running water?"

"You're revolting."

"Merry Christmas."

"Oh, sod off."

+++

Christmas Day was exhausting.

Dave could vaguely remember the first time his mom had taken him and Rose into New York City with her for a series of meetings. Dirk had been away touring at the time and she had no other option but to load both of them into the van despite the ensuing early morning tantrums. He would have only been about five at the time, with Rose six. Maybe it had been after their birthdays. He couldn't remember.

It took them almost ten hours to drive what should have taken six. Roxy had to keep stopping the car for bathroom breaks, for snacks, and to break up arguments in the back seat. They had to backtrack ten miles because Rose left her book at the diner they'd stopped at for lunch. He remembered falling asleep sometime in the afternoon to the sounds of rain splattering against the car windows and waking up in the midst of a Manhattan traffic jam. 

He recalled vague details of an afternoon spent sitting on the floor of Roxy's rarely-used office space, drawing on printer paper with Rose watching over him from a nearby chair. They were there for three days, continuously shuffling between the hotel and the office. 

The third night, Roxy fell asleep in her work clothes while they were watching TV before dinner. He and Rose woke her up when they started to get hungry and she apologised, almost in tears because it was after eight o'clock and her children hadn't been fed. It was hard to look after someone else when you were so busy, she had explained, no matter how much you loved them. 

It took over a decade for Dave to really understand what she had meant. 

When he made it downstairs in the early afternoon, he let his mother greet him with her usual display of over the top enthusiasm. He made a show of rolling his eyes, exaggerating the movement of his eyebrows to make it obvious that he tolerated more than enjoyed her fawning as if she hadn't seen him in a month. 

He spent most of the day watching Roxy closely. He kept count of her drinks and made sure that she kept eating to ensure the alcohol wasn't sitting in an empty stomach. Whenever the conversation turned to inquiries about her work or how things had been in their near-empty house, he deliberately made a nuisance of himself so that the topic was quickly forgotten.

By the time dinner was over he was too tired to fully appreciate the fact that Dirk had managed to track him down a Playstation 4, something that was apparently an impossible feat for anyone who wasn't him. He claimed that all it had taken was for him to casually drop a 'don't you know who I am' at the store until the employees managed to track down the last available console in the country for him. 

The smirk on his face as he retold the story was enough to convince Dave that he'd actually just put in a pre-order with Sony as soon as they'd opened.

In the days that followed, things returned to their altered state of normality. Rose drove herself and her hire car back to college the day after New Year. Jake flew straight to Houston for a four day stint there instead of going back to San Diego just to fly out again in the morning. Roxy locked herself in the basement for a day and a half and emerged with three articles written and edited, ready for publication. 

Dave couldn't help feeling a little proud of her for that.

His mom was happier when there were more people around. Christmas Day aside, she was drinking less and had gone back to showing more self control. For every drink she didn't have, he rewarded her with longer hugs and let her complain about the state of his hair without arguing back. He knew it wouldn't last beyond the first week of January but as long as they kept doing what they were doing, her secret would stay safe a little longer.

Like he'd promised weeks earlier in California, Dirk drove Dave into town for his optometrists appointment the day before school resumed for the semester. 

It was snowing lightly during their near silent trip as Dave occupied himself with his phone, uselessly flicking from one app to another without really looking at anything properly. Every time Dirk tried to rekindle the conversation, he gave clipped responses and refused to stop app-hopping. 

"You nervous?"

"Nope," Dave deadpanned, his expression stony behind his shades. 

"We pulled up five minutes ago and you're still wearing your seatbelt."

"I'm fine."

"Dude, you've been on edge all week."

"Have not," he said, tilting his phone away so that Dirk wouldn't notice he was only pretending to reply to his messages.

"Dave."

"What?"

"You're not going blind. We know that's not a thing that's gonna happen, barring the obvious old age or freak accident options. That's not what's going on," Dirk said more gently. He still had the keys in the ignition to run the heater, because until he'd asked the question they had just been sitting in what he hoped was a comforting silence.

"Then what is?" Dave snapped, finally abandoning the safety net his phone provided to engage in the conversation. "What the fuck set me off?"

"I don't know, man, that's why we're here. You were outdoors for Gym that morning, it was probably just a combination of the light exposure and glare from the snow. That's happened before and it'll happen again. You're fine, Dave."

"Yeah, maybe."

"Oh come on, man, don't tell me you're finally going through your teen angst phase. I thought I dodged a bullet on that one," Dirk joked. Dave just slouched further down in his seat and tugged the seatbelt away from his neck when it started digging into his skin. "C'mon, let's get this shit over with and swing by Burger King later."

"That's the worst bribe I've ever heard and one time you actually offered me a fucking dime to shut up for a whole hour."

"You took that dime."

"I was seven and you made it sound like a sweet deal."

"Serves you right for being such a dumb kid. Just get out of the car."

Dave got out of the car.

He appreciated the fact that his appointments had been routine and predictable for years. Go in, sit down, read the chart, then let the guy shine blinding lights through his skull for ten minutes. He'd been shuffled off to a specialist in Syracuse when he was eight and she'd said the same thing that his regular doctor had been saying for years: his irises were inexplicably faulty. The condition wouldn't get any worse, but it wouldn't get any better, either. He was just as prone to regular age-related deterioration as the rest of the population.

Dirk had a hunch about the cause. No doctor had been able to entirely confirm his suspicions and he didn't have names for anyone who could give him the answer, but it was likely that the condition was nothing more than a series of unfortunate birth defects. 

Dave didn't need to know that he was probably a crack baby. 

Sometimes, Dirk felt that he didn't need to know that much information either, but his stab in the dark had been able to rule out a host of other possibilities years earlier, before anyone had worked out if Dave's vision would get worse as he aged. 

He sat down in the office's spare chair and listened to the conversation with his head in his hands, absorbing as much as he could while Dave spoke as if he wasn't even in the room. His overall migraine count was down, but they were worse when they did hit. He could have his computer screen one step brighter than usual for half an hour at time, which was something like an improvement since he hadn't been able to do that six months ago. He needed his prescription glasses for anything out of the house, but at home regular shades seemed to be enough more often than not. 

It all sounded about as positive as Dirk could have hoped. 

He struggled to hold back a snort of laughter when Dave yelped at the sudden beam of light the doctor shone into his left eye.

In the end, there was nothing surprising about the assessment. Too much exposure the morning of his last migraine combined with the fact they were happening less often added up to nothing more than him spending less time in pain and just thinking it was worse when it struck. 

Dirk did laugh then, but Dave got him back by hurling his coke out the window as they turned out of the Burger King parking lot.

+++

Roxy offered to drive her brother out to the airport the next morning.

"No way," Dave said, his mouth full of Rice Krispies. "If you drive, then you've gotta take me to school, and if you take me to school then you've gotta pick me up because, sorry Mom, but there is no way in hell I'm riding the bus home after being spoilt by the godly luxury of the shitbox for so long."

"So I'll pick you up, but I'm pretty sure you're the one who banned me from picking you up in first place, baby," Roxy said, throwing him a wink from across the table. 

"Yeah, because you're embarrassing as shit."

"No way, I'm totally the coolest mom you'll ever have."

"Bro's an A-grade homo, you're the only mom I'll ever have."

"Maybe I'm an even bigger homo than he is. How would you know?"

"Because if you were then Rose never would've come out out of spite," Dave pointed out.

"Yeah, there is that I guess," she said with a shrug. "Well no matter how you turn out you'll probably end up with a mother in law one day. Unless you marry someone with homo parents, I guess. I mean, you've got a set of those so it's totally a possible thing."

"What the hell do you mean by that?" he asked incredulously.

"Oh come on, we all know it's literally just a matter of time until my idiot brother proposes, you might as well get used to the idea of having a real life stepfather."

"The other part!"

"Oh, that," Roxy said dismissively. "Who knows with you? I had a read on Rosie _years_ ago but you're some kind of weird glitch on my otherwise pretty fucking accurate radar. I've got nothing."

"Thanks, Mom."

"Welcome, baby."

"Seriously? Fuck, what's in your coffee this morning?"

"Eight shots of whiskey."

"Mom!" Dave exclaimed. 

"Okay, wow, someone's shitty today. I can't even make a joke without you jumping down my throat, jeez."

"Wasn't exactly funny," he mumbled.

"Okay, sorry," she said, reaching over with one hand to pat his forearm. "I'll pick you up though, I promise."

"Are you sure?"

"Hey, I said I promise, didn't I? I'll always pick you up when you need it, baby. It's kinda in my job description."

"What is?"

Roxy gave her son a final, reassuring smile before turning to watch Dirk leave his suitcase beside the door to the basement. 

"To write articles that confound old white men who think they're the be all and end all of modern science when they could not be more wrong if they tried."

"Yeah, sounds about right."

"You don't even have a job."

"Jake's making him get one," Dave pitched in, standing up from the table once he finished his cereal. He tipped the excess milk down the sink and left the bowl on the counter, just above the dishwasher, and ignored the pointed look that Roxy have him. 

"Wow, whipped or what?"

"He thinks the boredom is getting to me," Dirk sighed, checking his phone. "Look, my flight's in two and a half hours, let's blow this joint."

Despite his apparent good mood and continual reassurances that he was was glad to be going back to California, Dirk was suddenly a lot more solemn once his bags had been checked in at Watertown. 

"Bro?"

Dave struggled against the vice-like grip Dirk had around his shoulders when the hug started to drag on for too long. 

"Be good," he said quietly, patting Dave's back before finally letting him go. "And fucking call me whenever shit goes down."

"The next shit that goes down'll get its own blog so I can simultaneously announce it to everyone I know. I'll name it [I'll Call You Asshole](http://illcallyouasshole.tumblr.com/) and it'll just be empty and then when shit happens it'll update and say holy shit some shit happened alert the fucking presses," Dave said, gesturing with one hand as he reached for his phone with the other. "Check it out, I'm gonna horde the URL right now."

"Go be a dick at school or something instead, fuck," Dirk grinned. "I'll call when I land," he added, moving to hug Roxy as well. "Look after him."

"We'll be okay," she replied in a whisper, holding on with her arms wrapped tightly around her brother. "Promise."

"Thanks, Rox," he said. With a final squeeze and a kiss to her temple, Dirk let her go and took a step back. "See you guys in a few months."

"Oh please, the second you get off your ass and get around to organising your tacky, homo as fuck wedding, I'll have us on a plane to California," Roxy said derisively, the hint of a smile crossing her face as she did. 

"How about you get off my ass about that? And you're an idiot, we'd have to come back here anyway."

"So you have thought about it!"

"No, I just read the fucking news. Look, here's my farewell to you and I hope that if I die in a plane crash this is what you remember for the rest of your life," Dirk said, picking up his carry-on bag and taking a step back towards the boarding gate. "Go fuck yourself."

She did laugh after that, and blew him a kiss as he grinned in return then finally turned to go and board his flight. 

"You okay, baby?" 

Roxy asked when she felt Dave nudge her with his shoulder. 

"Yeah. Like I know this makes me sound like a total fucking loser, but it's the first day back after winter vacation and I'm already like an hour late for school."

"You're right, you fucking loser."

"You know when you say shit like that, I write it in my phone so the day I have a complete break with reality and go off on some whacked-out suicide mission, there's gonna be a record of what tipped me over the edge," Dave said. 

Roxy didn't say anything in response. She just smiled to herself and slipped her arm around his and started walking them back out to the parking lot. 

She didn't know when Dirk would be back or when they would get out to see him on the West Coast. She didn't know when Rose next planned to come home or exactly how long she had left with Dave. But for the moment, it was back down to just the two of them and she knew she had to sort her shit out before his vague joke about losing his mind became more of a harsh reality. 

It wasn't about her, in the end, and she knew that. She'd been in control of herself for almost twenty years because when it came down to it, she had to do what was best for her children and if that meant trying harder to stay sober, that was what she had to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes, that is a link to that actual blog. why? accuracy!


	3. [I11]: Romance? What Romance?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which it's Valentines, 2014, and everyone is hilariously bad at it all.

**February 14, 2014**

**04:49 PDT**

"Hey, Jake," Dirk called as he entered the bathroom, his voice loud enough to carry over both the running water and radio.

"What? I don't have time for any funny business today, so get to the point sooner rather than later, if you could," Jake replied. 

"Yeah, you're gonna get lucky before five in the morning, that's a thing that's so not about to happen."

"Get out of the gutter! I didn't mean it like that, you filthy perv. I've got a meeting at six, presentations all morning - one of which is to eighth graders and let me tell you now, they're not going to give a damn about deforestation, and then I'm off to Boston at three this afternoon."

"Yeah, I know," Dirk said casually. 

"So what do you want, Strider?"

"Yeah, pull out the last name at this time of day, I dare you."

"The point, Strider, get to it," Jake snapped, roughly drawing back the shower curtain to glare at the out-of-focus Dirk standing there. 

He waited, despite knowing full well he was too impatient to ever win a staring contest. It was harder again without his glasses because not only was the rest of the bathroom more than a little hazy around the edges, but because he couldn't defend himself against the sudden movement of Dirk's arm emptying a canister into the shower. 

"Have fun in Boston," he said, slowly screwing the lid back onto the container. 

Jake just furrowed his brows and tried to focus on the mess now swirling around in the water at his feet. 

"Did you really just throw a jar full of loose leaf tea into the shower for that subpar punchline?"

**06:43 EDT**

"So who were you talking to at two in the morning?"

"None of your fucking business, baby," Roxy said with a smile. "No, I'm kidding. Of course I'm kidding. I was called in at the last minute for a conference call because apparently without me, progress comes to a grinding halt."

"Bullshit."

"Okay, it's bullshit. But the real question is," she paused, adding a little more sugar to her coffee. "Who were you talking to at two in the morning?"

"Friends," Dave shrugged. "Mostly I was just fucking around until the codeine kicked in. I drew a kick ass page for this shitty webcomic I'm working on. I'll print it out and you can stick it on the fridge or something, like _oh Dave, I'm so proud of you_ , it'll be hella rad."

"Can you please stop saying hella under my roof? You sound like an asshole."

"Thanks, Mom," he said, rolling his eyes and shifting in his seat to hunch over the table and pass Paul some of his apple. "Like I want to take her to school with me because she's totally my Valentine again this year, but even if I put her in that sweater Bro made for her last Christmas I think she'd be too cold."

"Don't take her to school, baby. You know what happened last time."

"Yeah, back when I was in sixth grade. This'll be different."

"No. You know I don't pull out the _I'm the mom and I said no_ logic very often, but I'm the mom and I'm saying you can't take your lizard to school. Make your fake cards from a fake person this year," Roxy said firmly.

"But Mom," he whined, deliberately dragging out the vowel for maximum annoyance despite his grin.

"No. It's getting weird. Make up a person like all the normal unpopular kids do."

"Fine," Dave huffed. He took a final, angry bite of his apple and left the core on the plate before disappearing back upstairs to get ready for school.

**11:14 EDT**

When she felt her cell phone buzz in her pocket, Terezi flicked the ear bud out from her left ear and pressed pause on the iPad screen in front of her. She raised one hand and removed the other bud, bunching up the cord on the desk. 

"Can I use the bathroom?"

"Sure. You want someone to go with you?"

"Me? Never," she replied, dragging her long socks back up over her knees. "But if I'm not back in ten minutes, you should probably send someone to find me. I mean, I could end up in Manitoba if I turn right instead of left, but who knows? It's always an adventure." 

She was halfway out of the classroom by the time she finished talking. It was a pretty good day, by her standards. From behind her tinted glasses she could almost make out where objects ended and open space began, and she'd read a full sentence on her iPad earlier in the period. It was a bright day for the middle of winter, so she knew she was definitely having a better time than Dave - she made a note to laugh at him for it when she got home. 

She found the far wall of the bathroom and sunk down to the floor beneath the hand dryers, clutching her phone tightly for when it inevitably started vibrating again. 

It wasn't a long wait.

"I'm skipping English because of you," she said into the phone when she answered. 

"You never do anything anyway," Karkat shot back.

"I was listening to the book! How dare you accuse me of slacking off, Mr. I'm slacking off right now?"

"Yeah, okay. It's not like I just spent half an hour trying to work out one bullshit equation or anything, fuck Physics."

"Wow, half an hour on one problem? You suck!" Terezi cackled. "Oh, I get it, you called me for a break, not because you actually wanted to talk to me!"

"Shut up, I'm trying to be nice or something," he muttered. "You know, for today."

"Oh no, don't think you can do that. You're already guilty, Vantas. I could convince any jury to declare you guilty of using me just to get out of Physics!"

"Hey, I said shut up, okay?"

"Oh, gross, you're trying to say something mushy, aren't you?"

"No. Maybe. Definitely no, god, just stop talking," Karkat said, flustered. 

"Oh, crap, just say it already before I fall asleep over here."

He said it. 

Terezi grinned. 

**13:56 EDT**

"They just put out a fresh batch of curly fries," Rose said, sliding into the seat opposite Kanaya with her lunch tray. "They should be there for the next two and a half minutes if you're interested."

"I might have a few."

"Of these? No, these are very much mine. If you want some you're going to need to get your own. I'm sorry, but you know how very precious curly fries are in this dining hall."

"This is a joke, isn't it?" Kanaya asked, perplexed. 

"Oh, god no. You should know by now not to get between an American and her curly fries," Rose said with a small smile. 

"You're really not joking."

"Of course I'm not. You know we only get them when there's a delivery error, so I don't believe there's any level of hyperbole in claiming this batch will last a minute and a half, now."

Kanaya looked annoyed for a moment, more by Rose's reluctance to share than the statement she knew to be true. She took another sip of her diet coke.

"I'll be back."

"You're acclimatising well, no true American can turn down the lure of fries," Rose said, turning to finish her comment and watch as Kanaya crossed the hall back into the service area. 

It certainly wasn't the most romantic of lunches, but considering they both had classes for the rest of the afternoon and papers due early the following week, it would have to do until they had time to actually leave campus. 

"I got the last serve," Kanaya said triumphantly, sitting back down a few moments later. "And quite a few nasty looks."

"Not surprising. Now, I'm about to be late," Rose pointed out, searching for the remaining crisp fries on her plate. "We're supposed to finish a little early today so I'll be back at the room by four thirty. Here," she added, sliding her plate across the table. "My gift to you."

"Your leftovers?"

"My remaining fries," she corrected, standing up. "Now you're some kind of fry Kingpin. I'll see you later."

**17:08 EDT**

Her class had, not surprisingly, run to full time, so it was well after four thirty when Rose finally made it back to her dorm room. 

Kanaya was waiting on their pile of blankets, movie ready to play and an unnecessarily large assortment of candy beside her. 

Rose dropped her bag at the door, and smiled. 

**20:34 EDT**

As soon as she had finished shovelling dinner into her mouth, Terezi had gone up to her room and Skype-called Karkat. 

It was almost two hours into their call that he stopped responding. She leant forward in her seat, trying to work out what was happening on her screen. The edges of her Skype window blurred into the wall behind him, but he was dark enough against the cream walls that she could usually figure out where he was. The only thing she could make out was an unfamiliar shape towards the bottom of the window, where his desk should have been. 

Then, she heard a faint snore coming through her headphones. 

She didn't have the heart to hang up on him. 

**23:05 EDT**

"Are you going to be up all night?"

"Probably," Dave said, sliding his headphones down to rest around his neck when his mom walked in and sat on the end of his bed. "I mean, shit, I'm so fucking popular right now. I'm gonna be responding to these asks for the next five years or something. I've got like eighty as it is and they're still coming in."

"Seriously? What did you do?"

"I drew some really graphic furry porn and said I was quitting Sweet Bro."

"Okay, I really miss the days when your lies were simple, baby," Roxy said, standing back up and moving to press a kiss to his temple. "Have fun with your anon hate," she added, brushing back his hair before she went to leave his bedroom.

"Hey," Dave called, just before Roxy pulled the door closed behind her. She raised a questioning eyebrow in response. "Please, for the love of any fucking God that exists, please keep it down when your boyfriend calls."

"I can't promise anything," she said with a wink, closing his door around when she left.

"Gross!"

**00:38 EDT**

When Jake went to reach for his bag as it moved closer on the carousel, another hand beat him to it and forced his own hand out of the way.

"Oi, mate, I think you'll find that's mine," he said irritably, looking up. "Oh."

"I know. I packed it," Dirk said, hiking the bag up onto his shoulder and gesturing to the exit.


	4. [A4A3]: yeah thats my full resume

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Dave talks a lot of shit and Jake gets stitches.

**March, 2014**

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 19:38 --

TG: hey are you busy  
TG: rose  
TG: rose are you busy  
TG: i know youre not really offline  
TG: no one is ever really offline  
TG: rose  
TG: im telling mom  
TG: okay so hey mom my big sister is ignoring me stopped working like fifteen years ago  
TG: she just laughed at me  
TG: holy shit youre deliberately being evasive now arent you  
TG: who the fuck wouldnt want to talk to me  
TG: im dave fucking lalonde  
TT: I thought you decided to change your name.  
TG: not until june  
TT: And I eagerly anticipate the day I'm freed from the eternal struggle of being your sister and can become the true cousin I've always been.   
TT: Then I'll only be obligated to speak to you at family weddings and funerals. Perhaps we'll speak occasionally on the phone when my mother wants to talk to her sibling and we can awkwardly fill time by discussing the mundane events that have passed since the last despondent gathering.  
TG: holy shit you spiteful bitch  
TT: I am kidding, of course.   
TG: yeah you think  
TT: My mother isn't clueless enough to call you in the hopes of speaking to her brother.  
TG: okay wow so  
TG: the spiteful bitch line was pretty much a joke  
TG: but way to jump so far over the line youve looped the problem twice  
TT: Thanks.  
TG: whatever  
TG: so are you busy  
TT: I was.  
TG: you know i dont count skipping ahead on homework like a fucking loser as being busy right  
TT: I'm aware.  
TG: but thats what you were doing   
TT: Do you have a question or are you actively being a pain in the ass today?  
TG: can i say both  
TG: i really want to say both  
TT: If you don't get to the point soon I'm going to leave.  
TG: okay okay  
TG: so you know how when jaspers died we had that big funeral for him  
TG: and mom got all dressed up like some schmuck ready to walk the oscars red carpet  
TG: just to dig a hole behind the house to put the dead cat into  
TG: and bro was all  
TG: no this thing needs to be like ten feet deep to stop the wolverines digging him back up  
TG: and i was all as if that would stop them free food is free food  
TG: and he agreed and mom cried for a while and we sort of ended up with this giant fucking hole in the ground  
TG: like a chasm or whatever theyre called  
TG: i dont think its a canyon because im pretty sure those need to be formed by rivers or something  
TG: but anyway  
TG: so we dug that hole and we put jaspers in it and covered him up  
TG: then mom had that fucking headstone made like a month later  
TG: and before bro moved out for some guy  
TG: gay  
TG: like that was some a grade disney bs and im never not gonna give him shit for that  
TG: but before he left we went and got a new cat but this one was kind of defective  
TG: and bro was all nah he likes you you cant throw him back now because its cruel and his mom will smell the human on him and kick him out of the nest  
TG: like i know thats birds but im paraphrasing here give me a break  
TG: so we got the retard cat   
TG: except im not allowed to say that to say that to his face because itll hurt his feelings  
TG: but hes okay for a half blind cat like he doesnt hiss much which is an improvement on the old model we traded for him  
TG: that was a pretty good bargain in the end because who wants an asshole cat  
TG: i mean theyre biologically assholes anyway but you dont want one with an asshole personality as well because they fuck your shit up before you even get them home   
TG: but yeah we got the retard cat and where was i  
TG: hang on let me scroll back up a sec here  
TG: right   
TG: so are those holes called canyons or what  
TT: You know that despite my earlier indications of wanting to be rid of you, I really do consider you my brother and I, unfortunately, feel some kind of affection towards you so know that I say this with the kindest intentions.  
TG: say what  
TT: Shut the fuck up and go bother someone else with your inane horseshit.

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] has blocked turntechGodhead [TG]! --

"Is everything alright?"

Rose sighed again and spun her chair around to face Kanaya.

"Dave's not," she said after a moment of thought. 

"Is he ever?"

"Very amusing."

"I thought so," Kanaya said. She was sitting beside the heater to do her class readings, curled up in a pile of pillows and blankets on the floor. When Rose smiled at her comment, she smirked in response and leant back against the wall before speaking again. "But I am genuinely curious, how would you know with him?"

"Because for all his bullshit, he's remarkably transparent. I don't know what the issue is yet, don't get me wrong, but I do know there's something going on."

"Do you have any ideas?"

"A few. But to pry any further right now would involve speaking to him and I don't feel like subjecting myself to that again," Rose said. She leant forwards on her chair, resting her elbows on her knees. 

"Do you want me to try?" Kanaya offered.

"God, no. Conversing with him in this state is something akin to torture. I'll contact him in a few hours and see if he's decided to be any more coherent."

"Torture seems rather extreme."

"If my brother was ever to be discovered by the government," Rose started. She slid down from her chair to settle beside Kanaya in the pile, reaching back for her laptop so she could continue working on the floor. "They would send him into international conflicts with the intention of simply confounding the enemy into submission."

"A potentially plausible possibility."

"Alliteration?"

"Not my finest moment," Kanaya admitted. "What have you been studying so intently this past half hour?"

"Arthurian Legend."

"Is that so?"

"It's quite fascinating. I'm sure I recall you having studied the very same material in high school," Rose said.

"Perhaps, although my Literature teacher didn't tend to assign over fifty thousand words of Merlin fanfiction as the extension task," Kanaya said with a coy grin. 

"Oh please, is that how little you think of me?"

"Well I could be wrong but that's definitely the logical progression for that train of thought."

"It certainly is, but fifty thousand words wouldn't sustain my attention for very long, now would it?"

"I suppose not. Is that the one I passed on for you to read last week?"

"No, but it's by the same author. I'll send you the link for this one later."

"Before or after you check in on your brother?"

"Don't remind me," Rose groaned, letting her head fall back against the wall. "In another few hours he'll be full of Red Bull and his bullshit output will increase tenfold."

"And you're waiting for that to happen before you speak to him again?"

"Actually, I've got a better idea."

Kanaya raised an eyebrow as Rose shuffled around and opened her laptop on her knees. 

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering timaeusTestified [TT] at 20:16 --

TT: This might be an odd question and one that is in no way meant to be concerning, but have you spoken to Dave today?   
\-- timaeusTestified [TT] is now an idle chum! --   
TT: Well, that was unnecessarily rude.

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering timaeusTestified [TT] at 20:17 --

+++

Dirk sighed when he saw the Pesterchum alert in his notifications bar. Rose had tried contacting almost an hour earlier and he couldn't remember if she had classes early on Thursday mornings. He sent her a text to see if she was still awake on his walk back to the car and by the time he was halfway home, she had called him back. 

"You know it's not even nine thirty yet," Rose said. He could almost hear the smirk on her face.

"And it's only after six for me, what's your point?"

"Just because you're well into middle age and go to bed before its even dark outside these days, doesn't mean we all do."

"Just get to the point. So, what's up, little lady?"

"Oh, you know, just writing a paper for my Literature class."

"How's the fanfic going these days?"

"Quite well, but I was actually working."

"Yeah, sorry, but I know that's bullshit. So what's going on with Dave?"

"I don't know."

"What do you mean you don't know?"

"I was going to ask if you knew."

"Can't you do the nosy sister thing and find out?"

"Can't you do the nosy father thing and find out?"

"Touche, but you have a reputation for that kind of shit. I'm known for being rad and admired by degenerate inner city youths. I can't just start being into finding out all his shit now."

"No, definitely not after you threatened to install cameras in Mom's house to keep an eye on things. You wouldn't want people to get the idea you actually care for him."

"Whatever. We got any clues?"

"No, not particularly. He's just grating today. Talking in circles about nothing in particular and expecting an answer."

"How's that different to usual?"

"He used the phrase 'so we got a retard cat' in the process of trying to ask the definition of a chasm."

"Huh," Dirk said. "Hang on a sec. Yeah, can I get a mustard fried three-by-two, no onions, with animal fries and a coke? Uh, actually give me a cheeseburger, fries, and a vanilla shake as well? Yeah, that's all. Thanks, man. What was I saying?"

"I honestly don't know, I don't think that was English," Rose said. "What was that?"

"Me providing for my family."

"Should I expect a burger in the mail then?"

"Fuck no, get your own."

"I'll book myself a flight right away. I'm sorry, but now you'll never know if I'm visiting to spend time with you or just for the sake of a burger."

"Life's full of mysteries. So are we getting anywhere on the Dave front?"

"I'll see what I can find out tonight. If that turns out to be nothing, it's up to you."

"Why?"

Rose took a moment to roll her eyes across at Kanaya while she waited for her uncle to pay for and collect his meal from the drive through window. 

"Because," she said, when the background noise faded away as he rolled up the window again. "I get the feeling it involves Mom somehow and she's your problem."

"Since when?"

"Since the day you were born."

"Yeah, but going by that logic, Dave's your problem."

"Not according to our birth certificates."

"Trivial bullshit."

"No, I'd argue against that. I've seen his paperwork and nowhere does it mention him having an older sister. Or a mother, for that matter, which I find interesting if understandable. I didn't know you could do that."

"Yeah, it's amazing what the courts will let you do these days. You got classes in the morning?"

"Not until eleven, no."

"Don't stay up all night reading fics."

"It's endearing when you put on the effective adult facade."

"Thanks. Now fuck off and let me revel in the praise that comes with bringing home In N Out."

"Is it really that good?"

"Nah, it's just a California thing."

"Neither of you are actually Californians."

"Shit, little lady, don't say it so loud or someone'll kick us out of the state."

"Okay, point taken. I'm hanging up now."

"Okay, I'll call you tomorrow and we'll go from there."

"Bye."

"Later," Dirk said. 

It wasn't long before he pulled up outside the house, parking behind Jake's car in the drive. There was a good chance he'd forget to move the truck before morning and that he'd end up having to make a trip to the zoo at five thirty, but it wasn't as if that hadn't happened before. Jake knew how to drive manual but hated doing it and hadn't made a habit of it since he'd discovered automatics were more common in America. 

He left his duffle on the floor of the passengers' seat and grabbed the takeout bag in one hand and drinks in the other. It took a little maneuvering to get the front door open but he managed not to drop anything on the way through to the kitchen.

"Dinner's up!" Dirk called, backtracking through the house. "Jake?"

"I'm asleep!"

"Dude, I brought burgers. No one sleeps through free burgers," he said, finally finding Jake on the couch in the living room.

"I'm giving it a jolly good shot."

"Really," he said flatly, slouching against the doorframe. "You're gonna turn down burgers."

"I suppose it depends."

"In N Out."

"Ohh," Jake groaned, forcing himself to sit up. "What did you get?"

"What do you think?"

"A vanilla shake as well?"

"You know it," Dirk grinned. "As fucking disgusting as they are, I figured I might as well go all out while I was there."

"Huh?" Jake asked, muffling a yawn with the back of his hand as he crossed the living room to follow Dirk back to the kitchen. "Oh! You were at your flipping interview!"

"Yeah. You alright though?"

"Oh, dandy. I had a busy morning, but Dianne rang me from Miami and I had to find some of my old plans to email her because they decided they wanted a different talk at the last minute and the poor girl was about to lose her mind over it all," Jake explained. "But my old plans were on my old computer and not on my Drive, see."

"And who's got the old computer?"

"Landfill? I don't know, they upgraded them all two years ago."

"Well shit," Dirk said, pulling out the chair from opposite Jake. "So what, you told the poor intern she was on her own on the other side of the country?"

"I found some stuff for her but she had to fill in a lot of the blanks herself, but I'm sure it all worked out. I'll have her write up something when she gets back next week," Jake said as he unwrapped his cheeseburger. 

"Poor kid. You suck at this whole 'being a boss' thing."

"Well I've never done it before, have I? I'll just mess this one up and three interns from now I'll be halfway decent."

"That's the spirit. So, you gonna ask about my afternoon?"

"Why?"

"Cold."

"I thought we were still talking about my day is all."

Dirk raised an eyebrow over the edge of his coke cup and slowly returned it to the table. 

"Keep talking," he sighed.

"Alright, then. So after I sorted that bloody mess out I did my usual rounds, a couple of feedings and so on, then it turned out that one of the tigers isn't well, the poor chap, but he wouldn't let me close enough to examine him so we had to put him under and he took that even worse," Jake went on.

"Look, I'm kinda pissed because that was a pretty obvious 'shut up and let me get a word in', but please don't tell me you've got some kind of open wound," Dirk said, quickly looking over Jake for any obvious sign of injuries.

"No, nothing like that."

"Jake."

"Well it hardly counts as a bloody open wound if it's been stitched up, does it?"

"So you spent the afternoon in the emergency room. Again."

"I do have medical training, you know."

"Yeah, for treating animals. Don't tell me you did it yourself."

"No, it's up on the back of my right arm. There was no way I could reach that and effectively put in the necessary stitches," Jake explained, reaching for a handful of fries with his left hand. "If I'd gone to A and E, I would've had to tell them I got on the wrong side of a tiger and they'd think he was dangerous, and that never works out well for anyone."

"You didn't."

"What? Have a colleague stitch me up?"

"Yeah, that."

"I did. Sorry, but we've got more than enough medical supplies lying around the place and it's not exactly difficult to disinfect a wound and put in eight stitches."

"Eight stitches? Great," Dirk said, taking a large bite of his burger. "I hope it hurt like a bitch, you idiot."

"Of course it didn't, I'd already managed to give myself a local anaesthetic beforehand."

"I stand by the idiot thing. What if it gets infected, what then?"

"It won't, I got some antibiotics to take care of that."

"I don't want to know where those came from."

"Why not?" Jake asked, perplexed. 

"Because sometimes, really fucking rarely, I come across something that I don't want to know about. And I'm talking once every few years here, so you know I really don't want you to keep talking."

"Look, they're perfectly safe. We use them on the gorillas and they tend to metabolise things similarly to us. Of course, I'm nowhere near the size of a gorilla so I don't need even half as much as they do, but you get the point."

"I just said I didn't want to know."

"I don't see why you wouldn't. Sometimes I think it's quite convenient that we're so closely related to the great apes. Did you know that standard human birth control pills work on the gorillas? Now _that's_ fascinating."

"Seriously?"

"As a heart attack. It's fine, really. They'll come out in less than a fortnight and everything will be back to normal. The antibiotics are just a bit of a precautionary measure."

"Great, so you got eight stitches from a vet today. That trumps my story."

"Oh, piss it, what was the result then?"

"You sure you're done?"

"For now, I'm sure I'll think of something else later. Go on then, how'd it go?" Jake encouraged. 

Dirk watched as he removed the lid from his cup and dipped a few fries in the vanilla shake before eating them. As disgusting as he thought it was, he'd never had the heart to mention it; Dave did the same thing at McDonalds. 

"Well the first thing they asked was if that was really my full résumé," he said. "I left off a lot of shit, y'know, same as with the other applications. But the fact remains that when you go straight from graduating UT in '92 to pizza delivery last month, people start asking questions."

"Like?"

"What?"

"Like what do they ask? I bet they thought you were in prison. You look like the type."

"Thanks, Jake."

"I'm just telling it like it is, you know. What else explains a twenty two year absence from society?"

"Shit, that's a fucking long time," Dirk said, taking another drink of his coke. 

"Another three years and I've been here twenty," Jake shrugged. 

"Shit, yeah, that's right. Remind me and we'll have a party or something."

"Now that certainly doesn't feel like almost twenty years, I'm telling you now."

"I'd believe it. But anyway, they looked over it, asked what I'd been doing, I kind of skimmed over the whole career but the guy looked like he had some idea. Asked if I'd worked with kids before, if I'd done much since I was in leagues, that sort of thing. I'm still fucking ace out on the ice, by the way."

"So?"

"So they're taking me on to coach for the Under 13's Spring roster and they'll see how that goes."

"Oh, bloody brilliant! That'll be much better than the last two jobs."

"Yeah, probably. It's mostly weekends and one or two afternoons a week but nothing late, at least not regularly. The adult rec league is on Sundays so I might do that," Dirk shrugged. He scrunched up his burger wrapper and dragged his fries closer to finish those off as well. 

"I'll take an afternoon off when you're playing and come watch. I'd be mental to miss that."

"Yeah, me and a bunch of other old guys trying to relive our high school glory days, it'll be great."

"Well if they're all that old it'll be easy for you to slam them against the wall, won't it?"

"Might be. It should be a good time though, with the kids, I mean. Never really got to teach Dave anything about hockey."

"Why not?"

"Too much glare. And he was shit at it when he was like eight, so I never forced him."

"Speaking of though, your boy called me earlier."

"Fuck, what did he say?"

"I think the question should be what didn't he say," Jake scoffed, reaching for his fries and shake again. "Went on and on about all sorts for almost an hour. I'd almost be willing to put money on the possibility he's quietly going mental about something, but who knows."

+++

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering ghostyTrickster [GT] at 22:38 --

TG: john  
TG: hey john  
TG: johnny   
TG: egbert  
TG: egbert  
TG: i know that looks the same in writing but pretend i said the second one in a shitty french accent  
TG: but not french canadian  
TG: fuck french canadians  
TG: i mean i dont give a shit but dont tell my mom i said that  
TG: shes got this thing against canada  
TG: i dont even know  
GT: you don't know why your mom hates canada?  
TG: nope  
TG: do you know i live less than an hour from the border and ive never been over  
TG: im thinking of going sometime soon since ive got a passport now  
TG: like holy shit i just got a passport  
TG: im riding the road to freedom here egbert  
GT: i've been to vancouver a few times. it's pretty okay.   
TG: awesome  
TG: so whats up  
GT: not much. i get my audition results in three days! i don't think i can wait much longer.  
TG: sweet  
GT: i've got a pretty good feeling about it though. they looked pretty confident and one of the judges nodded before i left.  
TG: holy shit  
TG: did you report him for like  
TG: coming onto you or some shit  
TG: holy shit a judge from piano nerd school looked at me funny  
GT: like you can talk, dude! you applied to art school.  
TG: yeah what of it  
GT: how is music nerdier than taking shitty photos for a degree?  
TG: it just is  
TG: what are they even doing to you kids on the west coast  
GT: you were in california in december and you didn't even fly back through seattle, asshole.  
TG: my uncle isnt convinced youre not a pedophile  
GT: i'm only eight months older than you, dave.  
TG: still counts  
TG: youre gonna be eighteen in like two weeks  
TG: im not until the end of the year  
TG: totally gross  
TG: i shouldnt even be talking to you  
TG: mom help theres a weird old dude talking to me on the internet  
TG: im pretty sure its illegal in twelve states  
GT: isn't your state one of the most progressive?  
TG: dude no state approves of creeping on kids  
TG: what the fuck is wrong with you  
TG: i should call in the internet police right the fuck now john  
TG: ill do it  
TG: ive dialled 911 and my finger is hovering above the call button  
TG: you cant get out of this one now  
TG: wow you are so fucked   
TG: fucked and fucked up  
TG: gross dude  
TG: i cant believe we were ever friends  
GT: were we? you're the one who's always saying that we totally aren't friends, even though we talk every day and i know about that time you shit yourself in first grade.  
TG: that wasnt me  
GT: yes it was.  
TG: nope  
TG: it was probably you  
TG: haha egbert shit himself in first grade  
TG: what a loser  
GT: whatever. what did you want?  
TG: dude i just wanted to talk to my best bro  
TG: is that too much to ask  
GT: it is when you click my name instead of karkat's.  
TG: dude no way   
TG: you are totally my best bro  
TG: no homo and shit but man  
TG: dont tell anyone but youre my favorite  
TG: except paul   
TG: shes the best <3  
GT: gay.  
TG: whatever man  
TG: karkats like my best bro in the dude lets be bros way  
TG: youre like holy shit i dont know why we have different parents   
TG: you dig  
GT: yeah, i dig.  
GT: sorry, man but that was so not no homo.  
TG: in retrospect  
TG: a little  
GT: the point, dave. do you even have one? because if you do you should probably get to it before i kill myself out of boredom.  
GT: and then, i'll respawn just so i can do it again.  
GT: and maybe once more to get the message across.  
TG: my shit got mailed early  
TG: bumfuck nowhere address and all that shit  
TG: i guess they wanted to make sure it got here by the first  
GT: who did the what now?  
TG: i got in john  
TG: im moving to the city  
TG: how the fuck do i tell my mom


	5. [A4A4]: i need you to pick me up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which all the shit hits all the fans.

**May, 2014**

"Oi, Lalonde, pass me one."

Dave didn't know when he'd become the designated beer distributor, but it probably had something to do with the fact he was camping out in the kitchen and had been for almost an hour. 

With the school year almost over and finals looming for the Juniors, it seemed only logical for the endless stream of parties to begin. As he'd moved up through the school, Dave had remained as uncool as ever but his ability out on the track was almost enough to make up for his eccentric classroom behaviours. He'd moved up into the middleground, able to move in both circles almost unnoticed. 

He'd snuck into the living room earlier and plugged his iPod into the dock so his own mixes had been on for a while. Someone had changed changed it not long after and started up their own playlist, which heavily featured the works of Di-Stri. He escaped to the kitchen after that, because it was too much irony for him to deal with. 

His classmates had no idea that the basic premise of _Send In The Clowns_ had come from one of his nightmares years earlier, and he had every intention of keeping it that way.

"Which one?"

"I don't give a fuck, whatever's closest."

"Corona?"

"Can you reach it from where you are?"

"Dude, look where I'm sitting. Does it look like I'm sitting in the fridge? Are my new neighbours beer and leftover lasagne? Actually, they kind of are since neighbours live next door to you and I'm next to the fridge so it kind of counts, I guess, but the short answer is yeah, I can do that," Dave said, working the fridge door open with the toe of his left sneaker. He pulled out a bottle and threw it across the kitchen, only half sure of who had even asked for the drink in the first place. 

No one had ever suggested that a party should be held at his place. Not even when Rose had still been living at home had it ever been thrown around as a possibility. He was almost grateful for that because he inevitably got bored and left early. There weren't many advantages to living so much further into the woods than everyone else, but the fact no one wanted to drive out to the reservoir on a Friday night was almost enough to make up for that. 

"Way to be an asshole, jerkwad."

"Reputation to uphold and all that," he shrugged, downing another mouthful of his own beer. "If I'm not an asshole people start talking to me, then they expect me to be their friend, and then they realise I'm an asshole and fuck off but let's face the fucking facts here and admit you've all known I'm an asshole since the second day of kindergarten."

"Ain't that the fucking truth? Thanks, man."

Dave nodded in response to the bottle raised in his direction before the guy left the kitchen in favour of returning to the living room. 

It was almost midnight and he wasn't leaving for another hour. He'd managed to get a lift with one of the girls who lived even further out of town than he did, but the only condition was that he got no say in when they left. He could deal with going home at one in the morning. It was longer than he usually stayed at parties, but a lift was a lift and since she was driving he could down a few beers and still get home safely. 

It was a pretty good deal, in the end. The party wasn't that bad. Still, he wasn't sad about the prospect of never seeing any of his classmates again after graduation. 

He lifted his headphones back up from around his neck and pressed play, sliding down off the counter to go for a walk. He checked his phone on the way and responded to John's Snapchat with a picture of the living room over his shoulder, to prove that he really was out of his house for a change. By the time he made it out to the yard, John had already replied with a picture of his own friends. Dave snorted at the brief image of the kids from Seattle and sent back a photo of his beer captioned with the comment _nice band of band geeks band geek_. 

He looked around for anyone he knew and ended up sitting down on the edge of the picnic table with two guys from his track team. He dismissed the offered joint and shook his still half-full beer bottle before slipping his headphones back down when he realised someone was talking to him. 

"What?"

"Next week, you coming after grad?"

"Dunno yet," he shrugged. "My uncle's flying back in from California so it's pretty much do what he says for three days."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah. So it's hang out with him or hang out with these losers, and fucked if I know which ones gonna be a worse time."

"Definitely family. Your sister still batshit?"

"Still batshit, just doing it at Princeton."

"Huh."

"Dude, my whole family is certified batshit. I'm pretty sure we went over this like ten years ago. Rosie's batshit, my uncle's batshit, my mom's batshit, I'm batshit. Our dead cat was batshit and the new one is blind so that kind of counts. As soon as you set foot on Lalonde property you get a certificate that lets you do whatever the fuck you like and you lose all sense of shame. That's the trick. No fucking shame."

Dave grinned and downed a mouthful of his beer. 

"Sounds like a good way to live."

"Yeah, it's alright."

"So where are you going next year?"

"The School of Visual Arts, down in the city."

"Yeah, you would."

"What the hell does that even mean?" Dave asked, cocking an eyebrow above his glasses.

"What, you were planning on staying here for the rest of your life?"

"I tried to run away once, when I was like seven or some shit."

"How'd that go?"

"My mom found me halfway down the driveway," he snorted. "It felt like I'd been walking for half my fucking life but nope, wasn't even as far as the road. I've got friends down there, it'll be great."

"Weirdos like you?"

"Dude, I've got nothing on these guys. They grew up in the city where it's totally acceptable to be completely off your fucking rocker. I'm the normal one here. Me. Dave fucking whackjob Lalonde is gonna go through a metamorphosis so extreme that in like three months he's gonna emerge as Dave the normal guy from upstate Strider."

"Strider?"

"Long story," he said, quickly knocking back another mouthful. "Hey, have you seen Jenkins? He still owes me twenty bucks from the last meet."

"Yeah, he's inside."

"Awesome, I'll be back in like five."

Dave was never sure how many of his classmates had figured out who his uncle was. Dirk had never stepped in too much at school and had kept a relatively low profile, and not much had changed after Dave found out the truth. Roxy was always the schools first point of contact, his report cards were addressed to her even though Dirk always got to them first. He went in for parent teacher conferences and the more important track meets, but he'd never made himself an obvious presence. 

A few kids had given him strange looks over the years but they didn't seem prepared to believe that Dave Lalonde's uncle was Di-Stri. 

Roxy, on the other hand, had been involved in bake sales and the PTA, until she'd quit because her ideas were too logical for a public school to ever take on board. 

Dave shot another few Snaps to John as he made his way back to the kitchen, still falsely claiming that he was having a much better time than the Seattle band dorks lead by the biggest dork of them all, John McDorkerson Egbert. He sat on one of the freed-up bar stools by the counter and put his beer down on the bench top. 

Forty seven minutes until he could claim that it was time to retreat to the woods. 

"Hey, hold this," someone said.

"Why?"

Dave looked down at the glass of orange juice that had been thrust into his hand.

"Because it's Shelly's, she's looking for it. Say it's yours or some shit."

"Whatever," he shrugged. 

He sent a message to Karkat, who he knew was still awake getting his ass kicked by Sollux. He got a reply almost instantly, the speed of the reply enough to tell him that he was losing spectacularly compared to Sollux in Watch Dogs.

"Dude, she's coming."

"So?"

"So start drinking!"

Dave did. 

"Oh my fucking God, what is this shit?" 

"Orange juice or some shit," Chris shrugged.

"Dude, if that's orange juice it's gone rank," Dave coughed, choking down a few mouthfuls of the juice. "Like fuck, this is so nasty, shit, one time I accidentally ate some green vegetables and they were nothing compared to this shit."

"Not my problem."

Dave coughed again, trying to dislodge some pulp from the back of his throat.

The itch remained.

"Fuck, are you sure this is OJ, dude?"

"I dunno, it's orange. Why?"

"Because it's probably not rank, forget I said that shit," Dave said. "Gotta go."

"Dude, the fuck?"

"Tell Shelly I'm sorry or something for drinking that shit," he added, hurrying through to the living room. 

He'd left his satchel behind one of the couches earlier and all he could do was hope no one had moved it since then. 

It hadn't been orange juice in the glass. 

It was tropical. 

He could feel the scratching sensation spreading in his throat and he knew he needed to find his bag and soon. He held his phone tightly in one fist as he sunk to the floor beside the pile of everyone's belongings, tossing aside sweaters in his search. It was only another few breaths before he felt the familiar wheeze starting and he knew he was down to about two minutes before things got bad. 

His hand connected with the shoulder strap of his satchel and he jerked it out from underneath all the others, plunging a hand in to rummage for the Epipen he kept in there. 

Chris appeared by the sofa just as he stabbed the device into his thigh.

"What the fuck, Lalonde?"

"You should probably call an ambulance," Dave mumbled, his head rolling back against the wall as he tried to keep calm until the epinephrine kicked in to stabilise his breathing. "Drank half the glass and I've only got one pen."

+++

"What's wrong?"

"Dude, why does something have to be wrong for me to call you?"

"Because it's almost two in the morning your timezone, what's wrong?"

"Chill, would you?"

"Dave!"

"Mom's not answering her phone and they said if I couldn't get an adult on the line they're not gonna buy that she left her cell in the car."

"What?"

It was only just after ten thirty in California but Dirk had been almost asleep when his phone started ringing. He'd been busy training the junior league all afternoon and had a game in the morning. Even though Jake had been laughing at him for how seriously he took a sport where his teammates were mostly older than he was, he was planning on having the last laugh when they won the off-season inter-house tournament. 

It seemed sensible to go to bed early to try and get enough sleep before the game.

He would have ignored the call if it had been anyone else, but Dave's name in the middle of the night set off alarm bells before he even picked up the phone.

"Mom's not answering her cell," Dave repeated. "Just tell 'em she'll see the missed calls in the morning or something."

"What? Tell who, kiddo?"

"The nurses. I'm in the ER."

It always had been hospitals that caused his heart to sink straight into his gut. 

"What happened?" Dirk asked, struggling to keep his voice steady as he kicked back the sheets.

"I'm totally okay, Bro. I drank some juice that was less orange more tropical and you can guess how that went down."

"You sure you're okay?"

"Yeah, fine. I was in town anyway so it wasn't like the ambulance had far to go. They gave me a second shot because my breathing was still kind of shitty and when I got here they gave me a handful of antihistamines because I still had a rash or something but whatever, it's totally fine now."

"So why do they want to talk to me?"

"Mom's not answering. They think I'm bullshitting her number even though it's the same one in my file. Just tell them she actually exists or something," Dave said. 

"You sure you're okay?"

"Yeah, okay, so the nurse is back, here."

"Okay, sure," Dirk said.

"Mr. Strider?"

"Yeah, that's me. So he's not bullshitting me, is he? He's okay?"

"He's fine. He was given a second dose of epinephrine on the way here and we've got him on a short course of antihistamines for the next twenty four hours just to be safe while his body processes the juice. He's under observation for another few hours but we can't seem to make contact with his emergency contact."

"Yeah, she's been under a lot of stress at work lately," Dirk explained as he set up his laptop on the kitchen table. "Probably left the phone in the office or the car or something. She's usually up at about seven, but I'd say the eight missed calls will be enough to get her to call back as soon as she's awake."

"Is there anyone else we can call in the meantime? If we can't get ahold of Ms. Lalonde in the next twenty minutes, we're going to have to admit him overnight."

"There's no one else in the state right now, but I'll see what I can do. Give me twenty minutes and if I don't call him back, admit him so I know where he is."

"Okay, thanks. I'll put him back on the line now," the nurse said. 

"Sup?" Dave asked once the phone was back in his hand. 

"I told them to keep you if they can't get Rox on the phone. Where the fuck is she?"

"At home as far as I know. Like she's not out of town or anything."

"You sure you're okay?"

"Dude, gay. Stop asking."

"Okay, okay. I'll call back in twenty to see how shit's going."

"Kay. Later, Bro."

"Yeah, see ya, kiddo," Dirk said. 

He barely managed to disconnect from Dave before punching out another number with so much force that he dropped his phone twice during the attempt. 

"It's nearly two in the morning, you absolutely ginormous twat."

"You've gotta haul ass to Potsdam."

"What?"

"Dave's in the ER, you're the closest competent adult, it's not fucking rocket science."

"Stop, what are you on about?"

"My kid is in the fucking emergency room and as far as I can guess from what he's not saying, my sister is passed out somewhere and incapable of anything more complicated than breathing on her own right now," Dirk snapped. "Get over there and pick him up."

"Dirk, relax, would you?" Jake said. He knew that it wasn't the time to laugh and he didn't know what had happened, but Dirk's reaction alone was enough that he had to force himself to stop smiling. "I'm in Pittsburgh. It's a seven hour drive at best, and might I remind you, it's two in the bloody morning and I have to be at work in three."

"At this point in time you're closer than I am."

"You want me to just get out of bed, get in the car, and drive to New York?"

"Yeah, what's the problem? You're only in the next state over."

"I can't, I have to work in a few hours. If he's in care he'll be fine until morning proper. They wouldn't let me sign him out anyway, if they even let me see him in the first place. I'm not family."

"Semantics are bullshit anyway."

"If I was an hour or two away I'd already be in the car, you know that. But I'm not, I'm seven or eight hours away at best."

"Jake, please, just get over there."

"How?"

"I don't give a shit, just do it!"

"Hey, watch it," Jake warned. "You're being irrational because you're panicking."

"No I'm fucking not."

"You're asking me to drive interstate to accomplish something I can't legally do."

"Look, I can't even get a seat on Jet-fucking-Blue right now because I can't get a fucking connection to Watertown until tomorrow night. I'm stuck in California and you're in fucking Pittsburgh, what's not logical about you being the one to go and get my kid?"

Dirk was almost ready to slam his fist through his laptop screen. There were plenty of seats available from San Diego to Chicago and he could be in the air within an hour, but he had no way of getting beyond that and over to Potsdam. He could fly into the city but it was a six hour drive upstate from there.

There was one other option, though.

"I gotta go."

"What? What are you doing now? Don't do anything stupid! Dirk! What are you doing?"

Dirk disconnected the call; he could apologise later.

He had exactly fifty eight minutes to get to the gate.

+++

She didn't even notice the headaches anymore. 

Roxy knew it was late when she woke up. It took her a few minutes to realise that she had even been asleep and that it was probably morning. She glanced over at the digital display on the DVR but couldn't focus on the numbers long enough to process the time. 

She didn't even know what time she had passed out. She remembered seeing Dave off earlier in the evening, but even that was well after they'd eaten. He'd gone at about eight or eight thirty and she'd sat down to watch Game of Thrones alone. 

The bottle of gin on the coffee table was almost empty. 

With a groan, she managed to sit up and reach for the bottle. Two mouthfuls later, she tried to check the time again. 

It was almost one in the afternoon.

At her best guess, she'd slept for at least twelve hours, probably more, and had no recollection of anything after about ten thirty the night before.

"Dave?" She called. "Dave, honey, are you home?"

She certainly hadn't heard him come home at any point, but there was no doubt that it would have been impossible for her to notice while she was passed out on the living room couch. Toast sounded like something that she needed. She could handle toast. Before she left the couch, she knocked back another mouthful of gin to stave off any further symptoms that thought they might try to kick in.

It wasn't until she had a pot of coffee and a few slices of dry toast in front of her that she picked up her phone.

There were eight missed calls from her son, three from her brother, and twelve from an unknown number.

"Dave? Dave!" 

Roxy stumbled as she kicked out the chair from beneath her in her rush to get upstairs. She almost tripped a few times and only stayed upright by grabbing at the bannister; there was no way that even half a day of sleep had helped to sober her up. 

Dave's room was empty. 

She sat down on the edge of his bed and, hands shaking, dialled his number. 

Paul stared at her from her tank across the room, startled by the sudden movement outside the terrarium. Her beady eyes watched as Roxy moved and turned on her heat lamp, something she was vaguely certain she was supposed to have done hours ago. 

Dave's phone was out of range. 

Roxy left his bedroom, trying over and over to call his phone as she hurried back downstairs. Every connection failed. His phone was out of service, or switched off, and no matter how many times she tried calling, nothing happened. 

She didn't want to try the unknown number. There weren't many things that scared her, but waking up to find her son missing and twelve calls from an unknown number were enough to terrify any parent. 

She knocked back another shot of gin and hit redial. 

"Canton-Potsdam Hospital, how might I direct your call?"

For a moment, just a moment, Roxy found herself unable to breathe. 

"Hello?"

"Hi," she managed. "I, you called. I mean, I missed your call. Calls. Last night, you called me last night and I missed the calls, all of them, why did you call me?"

"Okay, ma'am, do you have any family members staying with us at the moment?"

"I don't know! You called me, why did you call me? Shit, my son isn't in his bed and you called me and I don't know why!"

"Ma'am, I'll need you to stay calm. What's your son's name so I can check our records for him?"

"Dave, Dave Lalonde," Roxy said. "He's seventeen, he was with friends last night, and oh, fuck, they were driving, shit!"

"I can't seem to find that here. We had five admissions last night, and only one was a teenage boy."

"Strider," she said. "Strider. That's his legal name. Dave Strider."

"We have him, Ma'am," the receptionist said. "He came in at about twelve thirty for observation and we admitted him an hour later when we couldn't make contact with his guardian. He's fine."

"What happened? Can I come and get him?" Roxy asked, already looking for her keys even though she knew she was in no state to drive. If she found her keys, she'd find her purse, and when she located the purse she could hire a taxi.

"He's just fine. He had an allergic reaction so we kept him for the usual four hour observation."

"We live way out of town, it'll take me about an hour to get there, maybe more. Can you tell him I'll be there soon? His phone is off and I can't get ahold of him. I'll be there as soon as I can," Roxy said, as she stumbled towards the stairs once again to go and get changed. 

"There's no need, Ma'am, I'd say he'll be home soon."

"What?" 

"His father has put in an application for discharge. It should be approved in the next half hour and he'll be free to go," the receptionist explained. "Ma'am?"

"Thanks," Roxy said quietly, disconnecting the call. 

She had a lot of urgent cleaning up to do.

+++

It was always the hospitals. 

He'd always been able to ignore the 'what ifs' that came up about most things. Whenever Dave complained that he was starving, or cold, or had unintentional holes in his jeans, he could forget that there were three years of his life unaccounted for where those things had, most likely, been the norm. He could forget that he had no way to help if vague memories ever resurfaced because he had no idea what might set off something like that. It was easy enough to forget when Dave was as well adjusted as he was ever going to get. 

But the hospitals brought up too much and Dirk could only latch on to every hope that his kid never needed an extended stay in the place. 

He always saw the tiny kid, malnourished and over a year behind developmentally, enveloped in starchy blankets who had no reason to recognise him. He was the kid who who was unable to eat properly for months, who cried whenever he was outdoors for reasons that took far too long to diagnose, who struggled to use proper sentences until after he turned four years old. 

He saw the fourteen year old who had just found out he'd been lied to his whole life. That was hard. There had been a trust between them for years, a relationship between uncle and nephew that had to evolve and change into something more like father and son after being accidentally exposed by an overworked and underpaid nurse. They were still working on that, three years after the fact, but Dirk still saw the kid with the broken arm, high on adrenaline and worried more about his phone than his limb.

He didn't know what to expect this time. It could have been worse. Dave's satchel could have been moved, he could have collapsed on the way to collect it, he could have easily choked to death if things hadn't gone the way they had. It had been over ten hours since the incident. His breathing would be fine, his rash long since subsided. 

But he was still in the hospital. 

He was still sitting cross-legged on a hospital bed when Dirk sat down in the chair beside him. 

"Ready to go home, little dude?"

It had taken him almost ten hours to get to Potsdam and he was too old to be running on next to no sleep.

"No way, this hot volunteer chick said she was coming back with jello in like ten minutes."

He was still a complete shit.

"Are you shitting me?"

"What?" 

"Since when have you given that much of a shit about hot girls?"

"What the hell does that mean?" Dave questioned.

"It means since when have you given a shit about hot girls?"

"Since they got hot?"

"Seriously?" Dirk asked. 

That was probably a first.

"Nah, I'm just fucking with you," Dave grinned. "Get me the hell out of here, like six hours ago if you can figure out a way to do that."

"Got your shit?"

"Yeah, it's just the bag. You kinda owe me jello though, that part wasn't bullshit," he added, sliding off the edge of the bed. "It's just some weird old dude from the Scouts or some shit and I'm pretty sure he was gonna spit on it or something."

"How about Burger King instead?" Dirk offered.

"Hell fucking yeah."

"You want to drive?"

"Seriously?"

"Yeah, I only got a few hours sleep in on the first leg," Dirk explained, tossing Dave the keys. "It's in kilometres, don't go over eighty, and keep it to fifty in town."

"Are we still going to Burger King?"

"Yeah, I'm buying."

"Damn fucking right you are, dude. You totally just picked me up from the hospital, I need attention."

"Bullshit, you're fine."

"If I'm so fine, why'd you haul ass back here so fast?"

"Because 'hey I'm in the emergency room' is a pretty big deal, kid."

"You went through _Canada_."

"Look, it's faster to drive down from Ottawa than it is to drive up from the city, okay? Stop being a smart ass or you're paying for your own burger," Dirk said, frowning as he slapped Dave across the back of the head. 

"Hey, shit, that's child abuse right there."

"Yeah, fuck this, you're off the payroll. No more sales revenue for you."

"Oh dude, not cool. That's art theft."

"Go bitch to tumblr about it, they'll care more than I do."

"Cold, man."

"Just like your burger will be by the time you finally get your hands on it."

"I should report you for that shit. 'Hey CPS? My Bro-Dad is withholding burgers until I lie about him beating me'."

"Jesus fucking Christ, Dave, don't you have friends you can just talk shit at or something?"

"Yeah, but John's still asleep and Karkat's ignoring me because I sent him sixty eight Snapchats of my breakfast."

"Why?"

"Because my breakfast was disgusting. I sent some to Jake as well but he kind of won that exchange because he sent me a picture of actual gorilla vomit."

"Fucking hell. You know, when you say shit like that I'm glad I lied to you and never introduced you to him when you were a kid, or I would've had to sit through conversations about dead animals over breakfast."

"Dude, you say that like it's a bad thing."

They stopped just long enough for Dirk to sign the discharge papers on their way out to the car. Dave wasn't about to say anything, but he knew the unplanned trip across the country was probably inconvenient at best for Dirk. He was already booked for graduation and the summer and from the look of the empty back seat of the hire car, he hadn't stopped long enough to pack anything on short notice.

He didn't want to think about how long he would have been stuck in the hospital if Bro hadn't turned up, though. 

They detoured to Burger King on the way home and ate in the parking lot. Dave argued that he could manage a burger and the road at the same time, but Dirk pretended not to hear him and forcefully insisted that they should probably eat before rolling out. 

Dave caught Dirk up in the full story through large bites of his burger. The reaction had been to the juice, nothing else, and it could have been avoided if he'd bothered double checking what it was. He was only on his third beer at the time. It was just a dumb mistake that would have happened anyway. 

He took solace in the fact that even though he hadn't slept and had been called back East for something so minor, Dirk wasn't angry. Dave figured it was just his dumb parental bullshit kicking in again. It had been doing that a lot since he'd moved to California.

"So are you coming in or are you just gonna haul ass back to the airport?" 

Dirk scoffed as he unbuckled his seatbelt. 

"You know how in movies, it's always guys rocking up to the airport without a ticket and begging the check in desk for whatever ticket they've got left because they're trying to chase down some bitch that they broke up with half an hour earlier?"

"Yeah."

"I totally did that."

"You're a fucking loser," Dave said flatly, climbing out of the car and slamming the door behind him. He could hear Dirk still laughing through the closed windows.

"Except swap out that lame excuse for a 'my kid is in the emergency room' and you get a free upgrade to business."

"Loser," Dave reiterated, rummaging through his satchel for his keys. "Don't lose your shit with Mom, okay?"

"Huh? Where's that come from?" Dirk asked. He was out of the car by then, collecting the few things he'd brought with him from the backseat.

"Just, yeah. Don't pull the tough guy 'I'm taking the moral high ground' bullshit this time, okay?"

"Dude, what the hell is going on?"

"Nothing, it just sucks when you do that."

"Seriously?"

"No, it totally makes up for all the years you spent teaching me how to throw around a sword and giving me violent video games and generally being a shitty parent but awesome uncle," Dave said, rolling his eyes. "Yeah. Just be cool."

When they walked into the living room and saw Roxy sitting on the couch, coffee in hand and looking as if she hadn't slept in three days, everything suddenly clicked into place.

Dirk hung back as Dave went across and leant over the back of the sofa. He watched as Roxy reached up and pulled him down to kiss his cheek, ran a hand through his hair, mumbled a few things to him before she let him go. Dave gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze then waved to Dirk before he wordlessly continued upstairs.

When they heard his bedroom door close, Dirk sat down on the couch beside his sister and wordlessly poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot.

"Hi," she said quietly.

"What, you knew I was coming?" 

He gestured the to mug that had been waiting beside the pot.

"I called the hospital and they said you were there."

"We stopped at Burger King."

"I guessed."

Roxy leant over to rest her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes, still tired and struggling to cope with the building pressure in the back of her skull. 

"You know," Dirk said, taking the cup from her and resting it over on the arm of the couch. "You're what, six years away from a Nobel prize? You've been succeeding in a male dominated field for something like three decades and you've published more papers than most people do their entire academic careers." He stopped talking while he swapped his own coffee into his free hand and wrapped an arm behind her shoulder. "Then there's me, and let's face it, I'm pretty fucking successful. I've got all those albums and shit and they're still bringing in a lot of cash. You gave birth to the New York Times best seller of the year 2017 and I somehow spawned a kid who's gonna, well, he's either gonna figure out what comes after ironic post-modernism or end up in prison for doing something weird with a dead lizard. Either way, he's gonna be pretty well known in the art community."

"He'll be fine," Roxy said quietly.

"Yeah, he will, but the point is this. Between the four of us we've got a hell of a lot of force behind our names and a metric fuckton of cash, even if Dave's is gonna come from the weirdest Arts Grant the city has ever given out. Statistically, at least one of us is gonna end up in rehab."

Roxy stayed silent.

"Rox?"

"We live in a small town. Everyone would talk."

"No, _you_ live in a small town and everyone's been talking about you for twenty years."

"Can I do it on my own?"

"Can you?"

"I've done it before," she said, closing her eyes. "Before Rosie."

"Then start yesterday."

"Tomorrow."

"Today."

"It's too late for today," she sniffled, wiping her cheek on his shoulder. "Tomorrow. I have work to do anyway."

"When are you overseas again?"

"Two weeks. I'm going to London for ten days, then there's a few important things to take care of on the West Coast on the way home."

"So what, the week after graduation?"

"Yeah, three days after. I've cleared time in August to help Dave move."

"Did he tell you we put in all his college paperwork a few weeks ago?" Dirk asked, running his hand through her hair.

"I don't remember," Roxy whispered.

"I'm shelling out an extra two grand a year to get him his own room."

"He needs to socialise."

"That's what classes are for. The hell if I'm gonna subject some poor kid to sharing a bedroom with him," Dirk said. "That's a pretty good deal for a decent room."

"How much is all that gonna set you back?"

"Over fifteen thousand less than what Rose's is costing you."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah. This is hipster art school we're talking about, not Ivy League."

"We got the smart kids," she said with a soft chuckle.

"Smart is a pretty subjective word, Rox," Dirk said as he removed his arm from around her shoulders. He reached for her coffee and handed the mug back to her; she drank it, even though the liquid was barely above room temperature. "On paper? Yeah, they're pretty smart. Hell, we're pretty smart on paper but you're drinking gin for breakfast and I lost my shit with Jake last night and haven't called him since."

"Go, then. Check on Dave, call your husband, have a shower because you smell like a bear's asshole. I haven't changed your sheets since you were here at Easter but I thought I had another two weeks to get around to that, so you'll have to suck it up."

"Not my husband," he said, elbowing his sister as he finally stood up from the couch, taking his own lukewarm coffee with him.

"Words, words, words," she said dismissively. Dirk watched as she rearranged the cushions up against one arm of the couch. "I'll try. Really."

"I've heard that before."

"I'll do it properly this time. No exceptions. Well, no exceptions with the exception of spending more than five minutes communicating with Mom or Dad."

"Hell, if we ever have to do that I'll supply the sedatives," Dirk said. "I'll be as long as it takes to sort this shit out with my dipshit son and my not-husband."

+++

Dave grunted when he heard the brief knock on his bedroom door. 

He was undecided on whether it was more of a please enter or a fuck off, but Dirk opened opened the door regardless. 

He was sitting on his bed, slouched against the wall with his laptop propped up on his knees and Paul resting on his stomach. He'd changed into a clean t-shirt and what was probably a recently washed pair of boxers instead of showering, and had switched out his prescription shades for his gold-rimmed Aviators. 

The blinds were half open as well, which seemed to be a good sign.

"This bitch is gonna be so spoiled when I move," he said, as Dirk walked in and sat down on his desk chair. "I mean shit, here she's got her fucking heat lamp and sometimes I let her see daylight, but fuck, living in Karkat's brothers' room? She's gonna have like a natural light cycle and everything."

"So they're cool with taking in your lizard?"

"Yeah, it's not like she's gonna tear up their carpet or anything. I mean, I'd keep her under my bed if I could but they'll throw me out if I try to keep any animals and across the city is way closer than up here. Mom's out a lot anyway, she'd fucking starve or something."

"Dude, I'm saying this as both the guy who raised you and is supposed to support you and all that shit, and the guy who is nothing if not a perfect Kinsey six, but this shared custody of a lizard is the gayest thing I've ever heard."

Dirk had no idea how he managed to keep himself from laughing as Dave just deadpanned back at him.

"I'm not leaving her in the woods."

"I didn't say you had to."

"You pretty much did."

"If it's not shared custody then what is it?"

"I'm outsourcing her living arrangements."

"Nice wordplay."

"Thanks. I went with outsourcing because Karkat's people are the first guys they throw into offshore call centres."

"That's racist as fuck, dude."

"Nah, doesn't count if he makes the joke eighteen times a week," Dave shrugged.

"You're white, anything you say is racist."

"Exactly."

"Did you miss the point, or?"

"Bro, what do you want?"

Dirk stopped fiddling with the pencil he'd found on the desk and leant forward, elbows resting on his knees and a more serious look on his face than before. He noticed Dave lift an eyebrow over the rim of his glasses, encouraging him to just get to the point.

"Why didn't you say anything?"

"About Paul?"

"About your mom."

Dave sighed and pushed his laptop off to the side, shifting to sit cross-legged in the middle of his bed. He moved Paul so she was lying on the sheets in front of him, idly scratching the top of her head. 

He shrugged.

"Dave, c'mon. This is serious shit we're talking about here. Forget all the other bullshit for now."

"Because we were okay," Dave started slowly. "I'm seventeen, not seven. I can feed myself, get to school, wipe my own ass. I'm supposed to start making up for all the years when I couldn't do that shit by looking out for her shit."

"This isn't one of those things that can be fixed just because you can make toast without setting the smoke detectors off. It's a big fucking deal, kid."

"I know, I'm not an idiot," Dave said. "It wasn't as if it was that bad at first. Like after you moved out, and then Rose went to college, it picked up but it wasn't like it was anything serious. It only got worse after Thanksgiving. Like she completely lost it after everyone left again January. And I was like okay, this isn't normal even for someone as batshit crazy as her, but whatever, you know? Her kid left, you left, work was on her ass all the time, so it pretty much made sense."

"Okay, real talk for a minute here, but what you're doing is called enabling. You're letting her do it because you've come up with reasons why it's okay."

"Fuck, you think I don't know that? Of course I fucking know that."

"So why didn't you say anything?"

"Because she's my fucking mom, okay?" Dave shouted, before he caught himself and lowered his voice again. "Well, she's not, not really, because you're my dad, but she is because you always told me she was and I mean it's not like I know or remember the other one, so in every way but on paper she's my mom, and I didn't want to fuck her over. What kind of an asshole would that make me, huh? I'd be that guy who tattled on his mom to the authorities because he couldn't deal with her shit on his own."

"Dave," Dirk started, shuffling the chair across the carpet so he was sitting with his knees pressed against the edge of the mattress. "This is shit that goes beyond the realm of crap that kids should be doing."

"What, you were going to deal with it from California?"

"Yeah, I would've stepped in if I'd known it was this bad."

"That would've been totally effective, saying 'hey, just stop' when you're three thousand miles away."

"Dude, not cool."

"What? You know it's true. That's why you're pissed, because there's fuck all you could've done because you're living on the opposite side of the country," Dave snapped. He scooped Paul up and slid off his bed so he could put her back into her tank. "Like yeah, you could've said 'stop it' as many times as you wanted, but it wouldn't do jack."

"How many times have I been back?" Dirk asked, spinning the chair around to face Dave, who was taking his time adjusting things in his terrarium.

"Including right now? Four. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and the Emergency Room. I'll throw in the trip I made to San Diego to make five. That's it. I've seen you five fucking times since you moved like a year ago and yeah, there's all those Skype calls and fucking Pesterchum and shit, but when the hell was I supposed to stop talking bullshit long enough to throw in a 'oh, by the way Mom's half a bottle of vodka in and I know it's only breakfast but should I let her go or what?'"

"She's my sister, dude," Dirk said carefully as Dave crossed the room again and sunk down to the floor, resting his back against the side do his bed. "Yeah, I would've come back."

"She's my mom," Dave countered quietly, pulling his knees up to his chest. "I'm supposed to look out for her."

"Yeah, but there's a difference between looking out for someone and throwing yourself under the bus for them."

"I haven't been throwing myself under the fucking bus."

"How've you been dealing with this shit then? Like what have you been doing that constitutes 'dealing'?" 

Dave shrugged.

"Just whatever."

"C'mon, man, I need to know if I'm gonna sort this shit out," Dirk said. He stood up and pushed the desk chair across the floor and sat down on the carpet beside Dave. "Fill in the blanks."

"I don't know," Dave insisted. "Just shit."

"Like?"

"Like whatever I had to do," he shrugged again.

Dirk watched as he lifted his glasses and removed them from his face, spinning the arm between his fingers. He tipped his head back against the edge of his bed and stared up at the ceiling and the glow in the dark stars he'd stolen from Rose's room when she'd left them behind. 

"Dave, c'mon."

"I've been sleeping in the living room a lot, when she passes out. Doing, like, cooking and laundry and shit. It's not a big deal."

"Dude, how long have you been sleeping on the couch?"

"It's not like it's every night or anything. And I mean she's out of the country all the time, so," Dave shrugged. When Dirk reached over and plucked the Aviators from his hand, he let them go. 

"You ever think that falling asleep with the lights on and the blinds open might've had something to do with all those killer migraines around Christmas?"

"Yeah. They're not gonna kill me."

"Maybe not, but this shit will kill her if it goes on much longer."

Dave ran a hand through his bangs, brushing them back and out of his tired eyes. 

"Can you maybe fuck off or something now?"

"Yeah, okay," Dirk sighed. "I've got a phone call to make anyway."

"Everyone you know is here."

"You're not funny."

"I'm hilarious."

"Yeah, you're alright, kid."

"Who'd you piss off?" Dave asked, tipping his head to the side to look over at Dirk.

"Jake."

"Damn."

"Yeah. I can't blame him."

"You were being a complete dick, weren't you?"

"Yeah," Dirk said, with a soft snort of laughter. "Go have a shower or something, you stink like antiseptic and dying old men."

"You'd know what old men smell like."

"Dude, not cool."

"Not cool like you being a complete dick to Jake? Because seriously, I've got plans and shit, I'm totally not moving to the city so that three months in you can rock up and ask to live in my closet or whatever. I'll probably have friends and shit and I'm not gonna be the one explaining to 'em that you're living in my dorm closet because you got divorced," Dave said. 

Dirk laughed again and shoved him sideways. 

"Seriously, go have a fucking shower."

"You're not my real dad."

"I'm pretty sure we've established that I totally am, sorry, kid."

"Say hi to other-Dad for me."

"Okay, you can fuck off now."

"This is my room and you don't even live here anymore," Dave pointed out. When he stood up, he caught the sunglasses that Dirk tossed at him and slipped them back onto his face. "Hell, I'm only here for another three months and I mean sure you can move back in if you want I guess but I won't be here and you'll be bored shitless without my amazing as fuck company."

"Get out of here, you shit!" Dirk exclaimed, still laughing as he threw a battered left sneaker at Dave before he could duck out of his room.

+++

He caught a flight out of Watertown that evening. Before Dave drove him out to the airport he reorganised his tickets for graduation so he could fly back mid-week, instead of waiting another two weeks. 

Roxy insisted that she didn't need the help.

He changed his departure to the day she flew out for Europe anyway. 

Dave didn't hang out at the airport for very long. He just pulled up outside the terminal long enough for Dirk to get organised and out of the car before driving off to go home again. He waited until the shitbox left the parking lot before heading inside to check in for his flight.

He had half an hour before departure.

Jake hadn't answered his phone earlier. Whether it was because he was busy or because he just didn't want to, Dirk had no idea. He tried his number a few times but there was still no answer. There were no reply texts and his Pesterchum messages hadn't been viewed.

He got on the plane.

He was back in San Diego over twenty four hours after he'd left, running on the few hours sleep he'd had in New York and in transit, with no idea how he was going to manage the drive home from the airport.

In the end, he didn't need to.

Jake was sitting in the drivers' seat of his truck. 

"You're in Pittsburgh," he said, leaning back against the door when Jake lowered the window.

"And you're a complete cock."

"Checked your phone lately?"

"No, I didn't want to speak to you."

"But you flew back across the country to sit in my car."

"No, I'm just creatively filling in my downtime."

"By flying back across the country to sit in my car."

"What of it?" Jake asked, leaning his head back against the neck rest to look up at the roof.

"Sorry for being a complete cock."

"Get in the car."

"What, you don't have to go back?"

"I rearranged some things, Dianne is taking over for me. That's effectively why I hired her, after all."

He stopped talking while Dirk moved around the car and slid into the passengers' seat, and glared pointedly until he put his seatbelt on. He was still angry, and even though he thought it was well deserved, he knew there was more going on than Dirk had mentioned. Maybe if he'd checked his messages, or answered any phone calls, he would have known more, but Jake was far too stubborn to relent so easily. He reached over anyway, long enough to pat Dirk's thigh as an apology before he started the car and moved to back it out of the space. 

"Roxy's had her biggest relapse since '95."

"Oh. Well," Jake said slowly. "What now?"

"We celebrate my kid graduating high school like we're stuck in prohibition-era middle-America."


	6. [I12]: You'll get your dumb phone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we flash back to a life-changing moment.

**October, 2011**

"Tules, you're late!" 

"Relax, wouldja, 'Rez? It's like four in the morning."

"Precisely! You said you'd be up by three and it's now three thirty-one!"

"Dude, we've got hours. And a pre-order. Go back to sleep," Latula mumbled, burying her face back under the covers. "Or go to sleep, you just stayed up, didn't you?"

"Me? Never!"

Terezi fell backwards onto her sisters' bed as dramatically as possible. She managed to land on some kind of bone but ignored the awkward twist in her spine so she could keep up the act. 

"Go away."

"Or what? You'll tell Mom that you're being a horrible sister who only lives to break promises to her poor, blind, baby sister?"

"Oh, shut up, you're not even completely blind."

"Wow, I can sometimes see blobs of really bright colours, call the fucking presses," Terezi said. She sat up on the bed, because Latula's knee was uncomfortably pointy, and crossed her legs to make it obvious she wasn't going anywhere. "I want to go line up now."

"It's four in the morning, in October."

"Bitch, it's not even cold. It's gonna be like eight degrees today."

"You stayed up all night talking to that kid from New York, didn't you?" Latula finally sat up, throwing a pillow at Terezi to make up for the fact she knew her sister wouldn't be able to make out the disgruntled expression on her face. 

"No," she replied indignantly. "He's a lame sucky loser who sucks and is so lame that he crapped out on me and went to bed at one because he sucks."

"We're talking about Karkat, right?"

"Yeah, he sucks so bad."

"Okay, cool, I thought we were talking about the one you didn't want to totally bang."

"Gross. Get up! We needed to be at the Apple Store like two hours ago!" Terezi exclaimed, before remembering that her mom was most definitely going to be asleep before four on a Friday morning. "This is literally a thing that I need so I can live a full and happy life and you're just trying to destroy that. You're a terrible sister."

"Oh my God, Rez, chillax," Latula whined. "You'll get your dumb phone."

"It's an iPhone 4S, thank you very much. The 'S' stands for 'shit you're not getting because you're not blind like I am'."

"Cool, but whatever. Get dressed so we can take the car before Mom wakes up."

"I am dressed," Terezi said, squinting down to look at her outfit. "This is that sweater with the giant dragon on the back, right?"

"Yeah, but it's inside out."

"If it's good enough for me, it's good enough for the rest of Toronto. Ooh, you think I should take the cane for sympathy points to get to the front of the line?"

"As your radtastic and brilliant sister who's totally not terrible, I'm telling you straight up that you're gonna get into some shit one day for being a conniving bitch," Latula said. She grabbed a t-shirt from her floor and pulled it on with a pair of jeans, figuring that Terezi was right and it was definitely going to be cold enough to throw a jacket over everything else. 

"Yeah, but at least I'm gonna do it with a brand new iPhone in my pocket, unlike you." 

"Just get in the car before I try to run you over with it."


	7. [A4A5]: #bestmom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the sun rises in California and Dave gets a PS4.

**May, 2014**

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering carcinoGeneticist [CG] at 07:18 --

TG: this is it bro  
TG: this is it  
TG: the day is finally here  
TG: after however many fucking years stuck in this backwater school  
TG: like no shit fucking literally  
TG: ive been in the same place since day one of kindergarten  
TG: its actually fucking here  
TG: bro got here last night  
TG: jake stayed in san diego because yknow   
TG: everythings been on fire lately and all his animals have gone batshit  
TG: moms been sober for five whole days  
TG: rose isnt coming though  
TG: the bitch  
TG: like i guess shes got finals or some shit  
TG: but the point still stands  
TG: bitch  
TG: but anyway  
TG: todays the day  
TG: as of whenever i actually get my hands on that diploma  
TG: i will cease to fucking exist  
TG: i know  
TG: dont get emotional about it dude  
TG: but its true  
TG: dave lalonde is dead  
CG: WAY TO BE DRAMATIC, SHITSTAIN.  
TG: dude im paying pauls first month of rent in the form a new keyboard  
TG: because youre too cheap to buy one that isnt stuck on capslock  
CG: FUCK YOU.   
TG: wouldnt you like to  
CG: YEAH, LALONDE. THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT I MEANT. I WASN'T BEING SNIDE, OR BEGGING ANY GOD THAT MAY OR MAY NOT EXIST TO GRANT YOU THE INABILITY TO SPEAK, BECAUSE THEN ALL I'LL HAVE TO DO WHEN YOU GET HERE IS BREAK YOUR FINGERS, AND THEN I'LL GET AT LEAST SIX WEEKS WITHOUT HAVING TO LISTEN TO YOUR INANITY BECAUSE IT'S EIGHT IN THE FUCKING MORNING.  
TG: dude chill  
TG: i just wanted to remind you not to say fuck in your speech today  
CG: WHATEVER. DON'T TRIP.  
TG: awesome  
TG: good talk  
TG: later douche

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering carcinoGeneticist [CG] at 07:27 --

Dave knew that he shouldn't have been surprised. 

When he walked downstairs and into the kitchen for breakfast, dressed in one of Roxy's old Backstreet Boys t-shirts and the boxers he'd slept in, he found both his Mom and uncle waiting at the table. 

"What?" 

"Nothing, baby. Toast or cereal?"

"Pop tarts," Dave said, as if his response should have been obvious. He moved Paul from his shoulder to the table and went back over to the fridge to see what was in there that he could give her. He broke off a few leaves of bok choy and picked up an apple from the counter. He dropped the leaves beside the lizard and bit off part of his apple and gave her that as well. 

Dirk and Roxy were still sitting opposite him, knowing grins plastered across their faces.

"What?" 

"Nothing," Dirk said, leaning forward with his arms folded on the table. 

"You're starting to freak me out. And I don't mean like you're both actually insane and you're pulling your normal freaky shit because I'm nothing if not immune to that by now. Like, I'm considering being scared for my life here. Is that a legitimate option or what?"

"You tell me, little dude."

"I don't know, that's why I'm asking. What the fuck?"

Roxy just smiled at him. Even though she'd offered to make him breakfast, she hadn't moved from her spot beside her brother.

"I have no idea why you're so paranoid all the time. I don't know where you got that from but holy shit, baby, you've got to get on top of that or you'll end up living like some hobo on top of a secluded mountain somewhere."

"So basically you don't want me living in your house when I'm forty."

"Well, I'd welcome you because I love you and I really should, but I won't be happy about it, no."

"So Bro got a free ride but I won't?"

"He got a free ride because I needed him as a babysitter and then he never left," Roxy said, still grinning. 

"Okay, whatever. Get to the point."

"Geez, rude much?"

"Mom!"

"Okay, okay. We got you something."

"Why?"

"Because we love you. And I mean we all know you were a total accident whose creation was fuelled by an over-consumption of alcohol and temporary self doubt, and this woman I work with just got pregnant and the hell I'm doing that again in my forties, so you're it. This is the end of the line for the association between the Lalondes and public schools," Roxy explained, finally picking up her coffee again. 

"Dude, that's harsh," Dave pointed out.

"Whatever," Dirk shrugged. "She's got a point. You're alright, but I never planned you."

"Awesome."

"We did plan this totally rad gift though."

"That was the worst segue in the history of segues," Dave said. He reached over and scratched Paul between the eyes while she was working on a leaf of bok choy. "Like it's not as bad as a segway, you know, those dumb wheeled things, but it was pretty close."

"Look, it's too early for homonyms," Roxy interrupted. "Just give him the box."

"Cool, I always wanted a box. I need somewhere to put all those socks that Mutie's bitten holes through. What a fucking retard, they're always ones I've worn so they probably taste like feet, gross."

"Christ, take the fucking gift and shut up," Dirk said, picking up a medium-sized FedEx box from the floor beside his chair. "Merry Graduation or whatever you say."

"I think you say good job on being less of a failure than I expected you to be," Dave said, reaching for the box. 

"I can't say it if it's not true."

"Mean."

"What can I say? I never expected a kid and when you turned up I got this whole image in my head, you know, Valedictorian, hockey captain, Ivy League, normal parent shit."

" _Dude_."

"Look, of course I'm fucking with you. Are you on meth?"

"What? No."

"Then you're a success as far as I'm concerned. Open the box," Dirk said, waving a hand towards the FedEx packaging that was still sitting on the table. 

"I would've by now if you weren't sitting there accusing me of being a methhead."

"Look, everyone shut up because I'm getting dangerously close to needing a drink and we all know how ugly that got yesterday," Roxy interrupted.

"Mom!"

"What, if I can't joke about it, who will?"

"What's in your coffee?"

"Just sugar, I made it," Dirk said. "Open the fucking box."

Dave opened the fucking box. 

His surprise gifts had always been awful in the past and there was no reason for his mom and uncle to change tactics on him now. He'd always thought that the time Dirk showed up back in New York after a tour, Lil' Cal marionette in tow, marked a low point that could never be repeated. 

He was wrong. 

He dumped the contents of the Fedex box out onto the kitchen table and stared blankly at the assortment of items that spilled out. He'd never played hacky sack in his life, but five of them were lying in from of him, mixed in with loose papers that looked like some kind of music notations; he'd never exactly been good at reading sheet music and wouldn't be able to tell what it was for unless he looked closely. The three beanies he could appreciate though, they were a thing he could live with. 

"Well?" Roxy asked, leaning forward across the table with her hands wrapped around her coffee mug. 

"I fucking hate shrimp."

"Yeah, but that's the popular ramen flavour, no one likes the chicken one you do so you can trade and make new friends," she explained with a smile. 

"Mom," Dave started. "Not gonna lie, that's some hella dumb shit."

"Just you wait and see, baby. You don't need to apologize when you realise I'm right," Roxy said, draining the last of her coffee and sliding the mug halfway across the table towards Dirk. "So, are you gonna get dressed?"

Dave looked down at what he was wearing. 

"What, the Backstreet Boys aren't formal wear?"

"Not really."

"N*Sync would be though," Dirk interjected.

"Really?"

"No. Go put some fucking pants on, we've got a graduation to get to," he said, standing up from the table with his sister's empty mug. "You think you can do your hair in an hour?"

"Shut the fuck up, Bro," Dave said, dodging Dirk's attempted hair-ruffle.

+++

"Hey," Roxy whispered, leaning closer to Dirk. She waited for some acknowledgement, but when the most he did was shift slightly in his fold-out chair, she went on anyway. "Mushy or not mushy?"

"Definitely the latter," Dirk murmured back. 

"Why did you let him wear the shirt?"

"Because it's his last chance to pull the 'isn't Dave Lalonde' so wacky?' bullshit," Dirk replied. He didn't try to stop Roxy from taking his hand and holding onto it tightly as he spoke. "Besides, the 'me telling him what to do' ship sailed like a decade ago. What was the mushy shit gonna be?"

"He looks so fucking happy," she said, resting her head on her brother's shoulder. 

"You gonna cry?"

"No?"

"Don't leak mascara onto my fucking shirt." 

"Don't be a fucking idiot, you asshole. You think that today of all days I'd forget to wear something waterproof?"

"Sssh!" 

Dirk rolled his eyes when a parent sitting one row back tried to shush them. It wasn't like any of the kids were talking; the Principal was going on about something and Dirk had met the guy enough times to know he was a complete dick anyway. 

Graduation was always going to be an emotional enough event even without their family history involved. It had taken three meetings with Dave's guidance counselor to explain that no, he couldn't 'just not wear the glasses for the ceremony'; it taken a separate series of meetings to explain that yes, they knew his enrollment papers didn't reflect his legal name and that he wanted Lalonde on the certificate. 

Dirk was almost going to miss arguing with public school authorities.

It was all over pretty quickly, in the end. They both watched as Dave stood when his name was called, as he stepped forward to receive his certificate, as he gave a short but surprisingly well thought-out speech as Captain of the track team. When the Principal closed the ceremony less than an hour later, Dirk wrapped an arm around Roxy's shoulders, pulling her in close. 

Dirk had been living at the opposite end of the country for a year. It had been hard to maintain contact between the time difference, his work schedule, and Dave's school and after school activities. But it was different for Roxy. While she worked on and off in Europe and across the country, she had always come home to someone in the house. First her own daughter, then her brother, then finally the boy who would in time become her son. Dirk knew it had been a very long time since she had come home to an empty house. Even he was still adjusting to not having the kids around all the time, and he had Jake to look out for. 

When Dave moved out before the end of August, she was going to be left alone for the first time in almost two decades. Sure, she'd have the cat and Skype and a cell phone bill that was about to skyrocket, but it wasn't the same as having someone to sit with on the couch night after night to help you make fun of whatever was new on Netflix. 

He heard her sniffle, ever so slightly, as the kids paraded out of the gym. In response, he tightened his grip on her shoulders and pressed a kiss to the side of her head. 

"Think of it this way," he offered. "You're finally gonna have a disgusting teenage boy underwear free house."

"Oh please, he's got nothing on Rosie in that department," Roxy snorted into his shoulder. 

"Really?"

"God no."

"Huh. So, we just leave now, right?" Dirk asked, giving Roxy's hair another kiss before he let go of her shoulders. 

"We have to take Dave with us."

"You mean they don't literally just grow adult brains and get mortgages when the ceremony's over?"

She swatted his upper arm then shoved at his shoulder to get him walking. He was flying back to California in three days time and they had a lot to get done before he got on the plane. Roxy had made him promise to get Dave started on cleaning out his room, clearing it of plates and sorting through clothes that no longer fitted. It would be a good way for them to spend some time together, she'd thought. When her brother flew back across the country it would be just her and Dave, until she drove him down to the city and came back with an empty car. 

Dirk, on the other hand, would be back to playing chauffeur for the world's most surprising recipient of a Doctorate. 

Dave was just as eager to get back home as the adults. He nodded in the direction of a few kids that Dirk vaguely recognised before sliding wordlessly into the back seat of his mom's minivan. 

"You want some Wendy's?" Dirk asked, latching his seat belt into place as Roxy started the car. 

"You buying?"

"We'll call it a graduation gift."

"Wow, some ramen and Wendy's. You know how many notes I'm gonna get when I turn this story into a text post? A shitload," Dave said, as he adjusted his glasses. "Guess what, loyal followers? Yours truly just got the greatest fucking graduation gift in the history of gifts. You thought my mom's box of useless college kid crap was hilarious? Wait until you hear what my Bro-Dad got me, some fucking Wendy's."

Less than an hour later, after they were all home and dressed back in pyjamas, Dave forced himself to apologise for being a little over the top when Dirk presented him with a PS4 of his own to take to the city.

+++

It had taken longer than Jake expected for him to adjust to Dirk moving in full-time: months to find places for all his belongings, longer again for the attic renovations to be completed, and almost a year before it all became normal. They had both been forced to rapidly accept and adapt to the more obtrusive changes, like sharing living spaces, navigating who parked which car in the driveway, and the unexpected fluke of always wanting the shower at the same time. 

But while the big changes had taken so long to accept, the little things all fell into place near instantaneously. 

When Dirk had, in his first week in San Diego, taken to waking up early to see him off to work, Jake had fallen for him all over again. He loved his job, so much so that he had no idea why he'd even considered taking the promotion months earlier when he knew he'd give up everything and move halfway back across the world if the zoo told him it was necessary. While the silence that came with waking up at four o'clock every morning was sometimes welcoming, it had always been the loneliest time of day. It was just him, the very early birds, and the kettle. 

Dirk had made it a habit to be awake and organise their mornings. He would put the kettle on, run the coffee maker, and start some kind of breakfast. Kitchen sounds were a nice thing to wake up to and Jake appreciated the effort more than he could say. 

But when he almost walked into the attic ladder as he stumbled out of the bedroom, he was jolted out of his daze and forced to remember what day it was. August was almost over and that meant it was moving day back East. With a heavy sigh, he climbed the steps and stifled a yawn as he crossed the room. 

"Did you come to bed at all last night?" Jake asked, running a hand across Dirk's shoulders before he sat down on the upstairs couch. 

"I dozed."

"Where?"

"Couch."

"And how long have you already been at that darn computer for this morning?"

"A few hours," Dirk admitted, swivelling his chair around to look at Jake. "Rox's been up since five her time and Dave got up an hour later. They're just about to get in the car."

"How is she?"

"Doing alright. She's still holding onto sobriety but I think she's gonna really be testing that for the next few days. She's staying in the city for a few days to help him settle in and organise his shit, and she'll do a few days in the office while she's there."

"Probably a wise decision, on her part," Jake said through a yawn. "How about you, mate?"

"What d'you mean?"

"I mean, how are you coping? You've been up all night so obviously not smashingly, but I should probably be asking regardless."

"I'm okay," Dirk said, turning back to his computer. "Tired."

"Serves you right for staying up all night."

"I didn't stay up all night, I dozed."

"Do you want me to bunk off today?" Jake offered. 

"Nah, I'll drive you in. What do you want for breakfast?" Dirk asked. He switched off the monitor to his desktop and stood up, sliding his tablet off the desk to take down to the kitchen. 

"Just throw in some toast."

"What, full English? Yeah, okay."

"That's not necessary, you know."

"It is when I've been up all night and want to eat three pounds of bacon."

Jake followed him back downstairs. He almost jokingly offered half of the shower to Dirk, but it was obvious that not only was he genuinely struggling to not actually cook three pounds of bacon, he was also trying not to smoke the three packs of cigarettes he desperately wanted. 

By the time Jake emerged dressed and ready for work, there was a plate waiting beside the stove piled with what he guessed was his breakfast. He picked it up, along with the already brewed cup of tea, and moved to join Dirk on the top step of the back stoop. 

"Toast's cold, but the eggs are good," he said, putting the mug carefully down between his feet. 

"Tea?" 

"Spot on with the sugar, as always."

They sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the sun break over the horizon. While Jake scooped scrambled eggs onto his toast with a fork, Dirk alternated mouthfuls of his bacon sandwich with drags on his cigarette. Occasionally, he would rest the sandwich on his knee and swap it out for his coffee. 

"What's the plan for today?" Dirk asked after he finished eating. 

"Just rounds, a few school groups are in around lunch, then a meeting at two. You?"

"I might try to get some work done. I need to run site maintenance and redo some shit. I've got until mid-November to figure out how I want the album to go but I have to nail down a track list pretty soon."

Dirk's producer had asked if he'd be willing to put out a Greatest Hits collection, and he'd been putting it off because he was firmly convinced that ripping tracks from their specific place on their specific albums would ruin his narrative structure. 

He'd finally agreed to the album, but on the condition that it came with a special edition booklet to explain everything. It meant more work for him, and his ploy had backfired when his producer asked him to just run with that and write an entire book to nail down the full narrative. 

He'd eventually agreed regardless when he figured out that Dave's cut from art licensing alone would keep the kid in frappuccinos for three lifetimes. 

"Make sure you stop and see some daylight for a while, won't you?" Jake said, swapping his plate for the mug between his feet. 

"I'll get plenty on the drive into work. You want anything specific from Trader Joe's? You've got until we leave to decide so I can write it down."

"Not that I can think of."

"Great. Change your shirt before we go," Dirk said. He put out his cigarette in an old beer can and stood up, grabbing his mug with the pinky of the fist that held his lighter. "And make sure you close the door."

"Why?" Jake asked, looking down at his shirt front. 

"Because yesterday that fucking cat from down the street got in and pissed in the hallway."

"I meant about the shirt, but that's also a good answer."

Dirk took the plate from him and loaded it into the dishwasher along with his coffee mug. He turned and watched Jake leave the room, rapidly cooling tea still in hand, knowing full well that he'd find the empty mug perched on a shelf at some point during the day. 

Later, when Dirk pulled up by the service entrance to the Zoo, Jake leant over and pressed a kiss to his cheek. 

"Go home, go to bed, and get some decent sleep," he said. "Don't spend the entire day fretting."

"I can do three out of four," Dirk replied. "Go feed your alpacas."

"Not my department, mate," Jake said. He was out of the car by then, leaning back in through the window. "I think I'm on big cats this morning."

"Now those are some animals you don't want pissing in the hallway." 

"Oh, bugger off, you twat!" 

"Yeah, love you, too," Dirk said, rolling his eyes as he slipped the truck back into gear. 

He waited until Jake disappeared through the gate to pull back out onto the near-empty street. As much as he didn't want to admit it he did need more sleep, and hours of it. Back in bed by six thirty, he thought. That left enough time to get home, put the dishwasher on, call Roxy, text Dave, and potentially make another trip back to the zoo if Jake had forgotten anything. Bed by six thirty, alarm set for twelve, then drive over to do groceries. 

Trader Joe's, at least half a chapter drafted, and a shower. Between that, he wouldn't have time to worry about what was happening back East. He knew he'd get a call if anything went wrong, and he'd know when they hit the city because his Instagram feed would blow up with posts from Dave. There wasn't anything to worry about, not really. 

He was asleep within minutes of his head hitting the pillow.

+++

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering carcinoGeneticist [CG] at 14:07 --

TG: hey so im almost at union city  
TG: fuck me i know  
TG: jersey huh  
TG: you wanna meet up later  
TG: my moms buying dinner  
TG: she told me to invite my friends  
TG: and look bro ill invite you because my mom told me to  
TG: doesnt mean were gonna hang out in central park by moonlight  
TG: playing hopscotch and holding hands like little girls  
TG: mom says she knows a really good place in chinatown  
TG: y or n   
CG: WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU ON ABOUT?   
TG: my mom wants you to ask your mom if you can come out and play   
CG: THAT'S IT, WHEN I GO BACK IN TIME I'M BREAKING YOUR WRIST SO YOU CAN'T GET INTO ART SCHOOL.   
TG: y or n   
CG: KANKRI'S STILL HOME, SO YES.   
TG: dont forget to tell your mom

He'd exaggerated a little in saying that he was almost at Union City. They'd only just crossed into New Jersey and were still at least twenty miles away. Considering how long they'd been in the car for, though, another twenty or thirty miles was nothing. 

By the time they'd finished packing everything into the van, had sorted out snacks and travel mugs full of coffee, and agreed on the best place for Paul's cage, it had been closer to eight in the morning before they'd even left home. 

The trip to New York City was long and that had been a running constant for as long as Dave could remember. Union City meant they were getting close and it marked the point in the trip where he and Rose had always been allowed to ask, just once, if they were there yet. He'd kept quiet this trip though, playing on his phone for hour-long periods and changing up the Spotify playlists when he got sick of whatever his mom had chosen last. It wasn't as if he'd spent the drive down sitting in silence, he'd just actively trying not to be obnoxious for a change. 

He knew Roxy appreciated it, because as they sat parked in traffic waiting to move into the Lincoln Tunnel, she reached over and took his hand and refused to let go until _Rude_ faded into the next song. They'd both sung along, Dave reluctantly at first until he realised it was probably the last chance he had to indulge his mom's taste in trashy pop music for at least a few months. 

Spotify ruined the moment by throwing Iggy on after that. Even though Dave was sure Dirk had felt an inexplicable sense of unease from across the country, he captured his own look of disgust on camera and Snapchatted it to Bro just in case. 

Karkat had assured them they'd be able to stop outside his building for long enough to unload Paul and all her equipment, but they'd be shit out of luck if they expected to actually find a parking space nearby. Dave hadn't doubted him. Karkat's family lived on the Upper West Side, right by Central Park, and he was pretty sure that if you ever got a park in the city you just had to abandon your car and give it the fuck up, because you were sure as hell never going to find another space. 

Roxy had, however, always had a knack for making something out of nothing. She'd found lost toys in places the kids had checked three times, discovered ways of storing belongings even though shelves had been bursting at the seams, and even found time to get papers written even when she'd been explicitly told that the company couldn't give her any more. 

No one had expected her to actually get the parking spot right in front of Karkat's place. 

"Sup?" Dave asked, half-falling out of the van onto a numb foot. 

"Holy fucking shit," Karkat replied, staring at the van, legally parked by the curb. 

"I know, right? Mom's got weird luck like that. Anyway, we have to be halfway back across town in like forty minutes or they won't process me until tomorrow," Dave explained, sliding the back door open. "Any of the shit here on this seat is Paul's, so grab what you can." 

"The bags?"

"Yeah, the grocery bag has some food left in it so take that. I'll take her up then come back for the tank. We got her a smaller one because let's face it my room back home is probably bigger than your apartment," he went on, handing back the plastic bag for Karkat to grab while he figured out the best way to pick up the travel cage without scaring Paul. 

"Hi, hun," Roxy called out, turning around in the driver's seat to wave at the boys. 

"She's talking to you, Vantas," Dave said, holding tightly onto Paul's cage. "Shut the door, would you?"

"Me?"

"Yeah you, who else is gonna shut it, dipshit?"

"Fuck off," Karkat said. He'd already slid the door to the back of the van closed, and he waved to Roxy with his free hand before following Dave back inside. "How big's the tank?"

"This one's just over two feet. She should be okay, she doesn't run around that much anymore. She's pretty old." 

They were silent in the elevator up to the sixth floor, Karkat watching Dave, who was busy watching and making faces at Paul. Karkat unlocked the front door a few minutes later and led Dave through the apartment to his room. Their timing couldn't have been better because in the few minutes it had taken to get back upstairs, Kankri had decided to go for a shower. 

"Is the space over there big enough?"

"Should be," Dave said, putting the travel tank down on the foot of Karkat's bed. "So, how long do we have?"

"He's usually about half an hour."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Don't fucking ask," Karkat said, rolling his eyes. 

They hurried back down to the street and carefully removed the tank from the van's trunk. Dave's slipped an over-full backpack over one shoulder before helping with his end of the glass case. He'd downsized Paul's cage because he was fully aware that he was pushing his luck in convincing Karkat to keep her in the first place. He lived in an apartment and even though it was a decent size by New York City standards, he didn't have that much space to spare. He hadn't been lying earlier either; Paul was old enough that she was pretty inactive a lot of the time anyway. She was still healthy, Jake said the last time he'd inspected her. Just old. 

Karkat sat at his desk chair, out of the way, while Dave got to work setting up the tank. The space was on the floor but that was alright, they'd talked about that the week before. There weren't any small children running around to scare Paul, and she'd get used to the extra vibrations from people walking around soon enough. Dave had picked up a yoga mat to put down on the carpet to keep the cold out. He shuffled that underneath the glass and started emptying the backpack. 

He lay the slate tiles on the bottom of the tank, and set up a small sandbox in the back corner. In went some additional rocks, some climbing logs, and a water tray. Her heat lamp went on last, set up to hang over the largest rock. He sent Karkat out then, to get some vegetables and lukewarm water while the lamp warmed the glass cage. From the depths of the backpack, Dave pulled out a thermometer and stuck it to the inside wall. While he waited, he took Paul out of the small travel cage and sat her on his knee, idly scratching between her eyes. She'd be alright in Karkat's room, he knew that. She'd see more natural light than she ever did back upstate and if nothing else, it might help her get some energy back. 

It was a rushed goodbye after that. The water, leafy greens, and Paul herself went into the tank, but not before Dave snapped a photo of her on his shoulder outside the new enclosure. He uploaded it to Instagram then finally stood up, reluctantly letting Karkat usher him hurriedly out the door and back down to the street. 

"Get in the van!" Roxy shouted, leaning over Dave and waving wildly at Karkat. "Look, he's got so much shit that one more person will make this whole thing go a lot faster. I mean, who even knows if hipster school has a parking lot. Probably not. Anyway, just get in."

"Seriously?" Karkat asked, dumbfounded. 

"Mom, seriously?"

"Yes, and yes. Yes I am serious, yes we could use another person, yes I'll pay you in pizza but no, I can't confirm if that's for the help or for being his friend in the first place."

+++

They managed to check Dave in five minutes before the office was set to close for the day. It was nothing short of an event because he turned up with both Roxy and Karkat in tow. Roxy had amazed even herself and found yet another parking space, this time half a block up from the residence hall. 

He was lucky that the ID-issue photos were running behind and he wouldn't have to wait until the next day to sort that out, but the process was a lot more difficult than he'd been expecting. He forgot his own name, and tried not to look annoyed when Roxy asked the girl at the desk, as nicely as she could, if there was a Dave Strider expected. 

Getting his photo taken was an ordeal and a half, because he couldn't wear his glasses but he also had no chance of keeping his eyes open long enough without them. In the end, he'd kept them on while they had him stand in the right place and lined him up with the camera, took them off for a final check, and only opened his eyes when the countdown reached a second left. 

He almost didn't recognise himself in the photo. He couldn't recall the last time he'd even seen himself without the shades, let alone seen himself in decent lighting. Roxy let him stare at the photo for longer than she probably should have, because she knew he wasn't staring with the usual enthusiasm towards images of his own face. 

He'd never really paid much attention to his eyes. They were broken, defective, and unlike those of anyone else in his family because of it. His mother and sister had eyes that were definitely blue but looked violet in most light. Dirk's shone amber even in the darkest venues. His own were almost void of recognisable colour, most likely the result of illicit drug-induced birth defects, but under the bright studio lights and imprinted on his college ID, Dave could almost see a hint of the golden warmth he'd inherited from his father. 

He shoved the card into his wallet when Karkat accused him of loving his own face more than Paul. 

"Why do you have so much stuff, baby?" Roxy asked, after their third trip back to the car. "You two are getting the last load, I'm staying here."

"Bullshit!"

"Momma's getting old, Davey," she said, searching through the bags they'd already brought up in the hopes of finding the bed linen. "I'll stay here and make your bed, how does that sound?"

"Embarrassing as fuck," Dave replied, throwing two backpacks into a corner. Karkat followed suit and tossed the grocery bags on top of the pile. 

"You say that now, but who's gonna be mom of the year when you get back and find your bed made, your computer, tv, and PlayStation set up, and probably that bath cleaned if I have time," Roxy replied, emerging successfully with a Target bag full of sheets. "Now beat it. If you make it quick, we can get out of here and grab dinner before rush hour really settles in for the night."

Dave was about to say something else, but Karkat dragged him out of the room before he could launch into some inane spiel. 

True to her word, when the boys made it back up to the thirteenth floor with the last of Dave's possessions, including a bag of carefully wrapped jars of isopropyl alcohol, Roxy was emerging from the bathroom smelling of bleach. 

"What took you so long? Like, I'm not going to lie and say I rushed everything, because I didn't have to. You were gone for twenty minutes," she said. "You've only lived here for an hour, baby, try to make it 24 before you go missing."

"I'd lie about what took so long," Dave started, pausing long enough to suck up what seemed like half of the frappuccino in his take out cup. "But guess what there are three of in something like a two block radius?"

Roxy looked at her son disapprovingly, then turned to Karkat. 

"If he has more than two a day, he gets a slap across the face."

"Deal," Karkat nodded, perhaps a little too enthusiastically. "Any fucking excuse will do."

"Thanks, both of you," Dave said, rolling his eyes. He set down the backpack on his desk and started unpacking his jars. Each one was wrapped in a shirt, and as he removed the clothing from the glass, he tossed it into a pile in the corner to sort out later. The jars were lined up on the desk, against the wall, where he knew they'd be safe until he figured out exactly where he wanted to put them. 

Roxy pottered around the room, picking up the discarded shirts for the laundry basket and unloading any other clothes she came across into the closet. She moved around all of Dave's belongings, stepping over and around bags that were overflowing. She put his laptop on the bed and started a pile for spare and probably unnecessary computer peripherals. 

Karkat just stood, slouching in the doorway, knocking back his Americano. He almost felt like he was intruding on something, but it wasn't the school that he didn't attend. Dave had been going on for months about the fact they were going to be within walking distance of each other and yeah, he'd figured that with the lizard living at his place they'd be hanging out a lot. 

It was the fact that Dave's Mom was still there.

He'd met her before, but only over Skype, and he didn't know how to phrase a goodbye that wouldn't look like he was trying his best to abscond. She'd invited him along to Dave's check-in, to help them unload the van, and even out for dinner. He wasn't going to turn down the offer, not with Kankri still skulking around the apartment, but that didn't mean he felt any more at ease with the invitations. 

He knew Dave's Mom was batshit insane, but when he watched her smooth down Dave's hair only for him to flip it back the other way, he remembered that she was saying goodbye to her youngest child. His own Mom would have had a heart attack if he'd tried to move across the state, if the reaction to Kankri leaving for college was any indication. 

"Quit the creepy voyeuristic shit and help me find an ethernet cable," Dave said. "And shout out if you find the wifi router, that'd be sweet."

"Shut the fuck up and do it yourself," Karkat snapped, throwing his empty coffee cup into the bagless trash can. 

"Hey, do y'all want me to step out for a minute or something?" Roxy interrupted, taking a step forward so she was in Dave's line of sight. "Because I can, you know."

"Gross, Mom. No, disgusting. Whatever's even more disgusting than disgusting."

"Well finish what you're doing and let's get out of here. There's no way that you're not having pizza on your first night living in the city."

"Yeah, say it louder so everyone on the floor knows I'm some country hick, thanks Mom."

"Two minutes. And don't forget to pee first, who knows how long it'll take us to find a park out there. I think I've used up all my parking space luck for the next three years," Roxy said, collecting her purse from the floor beside the desk. "Unless you need more than two minutes."

"I'm going to pee, then throw up," Dave said, finally leaving his jars. He shut the bathroom door with probably just a little too much force. 

Roxy sniggered. 

"I'm totally just fucking around, sorry," she said to Karkat. "Unless I'm right. Am I right?"

"Jesus fucking Christ, no."

"Look, I don't know, I'm just his mother. I'm done, jokes over. Last thing I want is him to be pissed at me all night."

"I wouldn't put it past him." 

"Me neither." It was Karkat's turn to snigger, then.

+++

timaeusTestified [TT] on YESTERDAY 08-22-2014 opened memo on board THE STRIDER-LALONDE SHIT-TALKING HOTSPOT: DID YOU PACK YOUR FUCKING UNDERWEAR EDITION FT. JAKE ENGLISH.

TT: How's your pizza, kiddo?   
TG: amazing  
TG: godlike  
TG: food of the fucking gods  
TG: so good i might move to new york  
TG: oh wait   
TG: bby stop  
TG: eat ur pizza   
TT: Jesus. Everything's under control then?   
TG: yeh. we unpakd n moved the lizard in   
GT: You're only just eating now?   
TT: It's only 6 on the East Coast.   
GT: Well you could have just said that instead of typing it!   
TG: dads pls   
TG: *hi 5!*   
TG: mom pls  
TG: why are you awake   
TG: me??   
TG: no jake   
GT: Because i actually DONT have to work tomorrow for the first time in at least six months!   
TT: Yeah, imagine that. Not working on a Sunday.   
GT: Says he who still refuses to get a real job.   
TT: I'm writing a fucking book.   
TG: r u2 in the same room???   
TT: No.   
GT: Yes   
TT: No.   
GT: Yefkdsnl   
TT: Jake just had a stroke, we need to go.   
GT: Idiot swiped my phone like the felon he is.   
TG: is this really a thing thats happening to me right now  
TG: is it  
TG: my life has officially come to this  
TG: how the fuck did i survive until now   
TT: Fine. Yes, we're in the same room.   
TG: no1 wants 2 no which room!   
TG: im out  
TG: im so out  
TG: i live on the thirteenth floor of a building now  
TG: i could throw myself onto the pavement  
TG: and no one would say anything because i go to art school  
TG: and someone would think my dismembered corpse was an installation piece   
TG: gorss.   
TG: sorry but not sorry mom  
TG: oh theyll say  
TG: we never saw it coming  
TG: he was quiet and kept to himself  
TG: who is he theyll say  
TG: cries of no one fucking knows because its the first night of college echo through the halls  
TG: here on lexington ave lies dave lalonde  
TG: succeeded by his dragon paul  
TG: a fucking men  
TG: mom no  
TG: mom stop it  
TG: MOM   
TT: Holy shit, Rox, he used capitals. What are you doing?

carcinoGeneticist [CG] RIGHT NOW responded to memo.

TT: Well, now this just got interesting.   
TG: shut the fuck up rose   
GT: Whos that?   
TT: Dave's friend.   
GT: Which one?   
TT: He's only got like three. Take your pick.   
TG: he was so confused???  
TG: davey was trying to xplain n it wasnt workin   
TG: you didnt have to invite him in here   
CG: I CAN READ WHAT YOU'RE SAYING NOW, SHITSTAIN.   
TT: I was wondering what the first thing he'd say would be.   
TG: and again  
TG: shut the fuck up rose   
TT: Never. Hello, Karkat.   
CG: LOOK, I'M GOING TO SIT HERE IN THE CORNER, QUIETLY, AND JUST PRETEND THIS ISN'T HAPPENING.   
CG: BECAUSE YOU'RE ALL LUNATICS.   
TG: no fucking shit bro  
TG: youre in this shit now  
TG: youre like pauls live in nanny  
TG: so deep in this shit its like the fucking jungles of nam   
CG: I'M GOING TO PUNCH HIM.  
CG: HEY, LOOK AT THAT. I PUNCHED HIM.   
TG: now nw kiddies, stop fiteing or u wont get icecream

Roxy finally put her phone down on the restaurant table. Dave was still ranting about something and beside him, Karkat was scrolling up to try and figure out what kind of conversation he'd been thrown into. 

Even though they were all in a group chat together, Roxy had been sending messages back and forth with Dirk ever since they'd sat down at the pizza place. She'd been catching him up on their afternoon, letting him know that everything was safely in Dave's dorm room, that everything was okay, that Dave was okay. 

It had taken every ounce of strength to convince Dirk to stay in California for this one. She was sure it was her job to move Dave into college, to do everything she was doing for him now. When the night was over, the pizza eaten, she knew she'd have to drive back to the Upper West Side, then back to drop Dave off at school. She'd considered making him stay in the hotel with her, or even sleeping on his floor for the first night, but that was no doubt too much, and her letting her heart get in the way of her son growing up. 

She didn't know what he'd do once he was left alone in the residence building. Knowing Dave, he'd organise the dead animals to his liking, set up his wifi to get Spotify going on his laptop, and then reconfigure his desktop because with it being unplugged for a few days it had lost all of his brightness settings. 

They had a list of things to do the next day, and the day after that, so Roxy knew that it wasn't as if she was all of a sudden going to lose Dave to the call of the city. There were a few things they were going to do, tourist-oriented places they were going to see before she left town. She watched her son bicker with his friend, sadly admitting to herself just how good for him the move was going to be. He was smiling, happy, and she couldn't remember the last time she'd seen him smile as much as he had in the last few hours. 

"You ready to go?" She asked, eyes skimming over the empty pizza trays; evidently, she hadn't over-ordered, and was only surprised at herself for neglecting to realise that two teenage boys would eat at least twice as much as Dave could on his own. 

"Yeah," Dave replied. He looked over at Karkat for confirmation, but only got a shrug in reply. 

They all ordered their last free refill to-go and left the restaurant after Roxy paid for everything. She dropped back a little on the two block walk to the car, skimming over her emails in favour of replying to all of Dirk's texts. She held up the phone and took a photo of the boys from behind, clearly in the middle of an argument they would both claim was simply a conversation. She sent a copy to Dirk and saved it to her gallery as well, with the intention of sending it to Dave sometime later. 

Dirk replied quickly, something about how much she'd paid Karkat to hang out with them for so long.

She smirked to herself, and took a few running steps to catch up so they wouldn't have to loiter around the unlocked van for five minutes.

+++

Dave had always thought it would be harder to say goodbye to his mom. It could have been because they weren't really saying goodbye, because he knew she'd meet him out front the next morning ready to play tourist before they hit up the nearest department store for the last few things he needed for his room. 

They dropped Karkat off a block from his building. Roxy had let him out of the car while they were stuck in traffic so she could turn down the next street so it would be easier to get back to Dave's dorm. It was a pretty quiet trip after that. She pulled up in the loading bay out front of the hall, and silently turned the car off as Dave climbed out of the passengers' side. 

"What're you gonna do?" She asked. 

Dave shrugged.

"Play some COD with Bro?"

"I think he'd like that," she laughed, stepping up onto the curb to pull Dave in for a hug. 

She held on for what felt like too long, but when Dave finally hugged her back she only held him even more tightly. 

"Gotta go, Mom," he said into her hair. "No. Really, you have to let go. Mom? Mom, gross!" He exclaimed, trying to work his way free from the flurry of kisses she was pressing to his face.

"Be good," she said. "And by that I mean don't be a complete asshole to your RA on the first night," she said, wiping away any faint lipstick stains that clung to his cheeks. 

"I won't. Hey, smile," he said, holding out his phone. He pushed his glasses up with his free hand and then brushed his hair into place around them. Roxy laughed and ran her fingers through her curls a few times, then stared back at the camera, smiling, because she knew better than to waste time when Dave was trying so hard not to let his eyes water. 

He snapped the photo, and another one with his glasses back firmly on his nose in case he decided he didn't like the first one. 

"Don't stay up too late," she said, smacking one final kiss to his cheek. "I'll meet you here at eleven," she added, ducking back around to the drivers' side of the car. 

"Yeah, see you then. Bye, Mom," he said. 

If anyone asked, he'd tell them he went straight inside. Roxy saw him though, standing by the curb until she turned a corner. She didn't know how long he waited.

Dave flicked back and forth between the two photos all the way up to his floor. He decided on the second, because he was convinced he could see his eyes watering in the first. He ran it through a few quick alterations in Square InstaPic, then posted it to Twitter and Facebook, along with his personal Instagram feed. 

#nyc, #bestmom; it didn't feel like the right time to be a smart ass. 

He threw his phone onto the desk, sat down on the pile of clothes in the middle of the floor, and loaded up the PS4 to hang out with Dirk. 

He never even heard the Pesterchum alert.

+++

GT: dave! we need to talk right now!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. That sure was an ending. What's next? Act 5, of course. 
> 
> twoperfectlittlefreaks.tumblr.com, as always, for more info. 
> 
> I love you all. Especially you.

**Author's Note:**

> As usual, update info, ranting, and general shenaniganising can be found at twoperfectlittlefreaks.tumblr.com/!


End file.
